Roxio Creator 2010

Roxio Creator promises to be the one program for all of your creative jobs, from editing photos and videos to capturing music and making greetings cards.

Like similar programs it uses a single starting point – the Home page shows frequently used tasks and other categories are listed on one side. The Learning Center has video tutorials that also come with printable companions.

The first step of any project is to get the files onto the computer. The import tool will scan the computer for existing music, video and pictures. It didn’t suggest any folder names for imported media and so just saved everything in the Documents folder.

This hasn’t changed from previous versions and can lead to problems when there are hundreds of files in the same folder. Users can’t simply enter their own folder names either, instead there’s a two-step process to create a new one. A redeeming feature is that it is easy to name photos.

The media browser is rather limited because although it can filter things by date, it’s limited to the last week, month or year. Should you want to look for a photo from August 2005, say, the only option is to show all the photos sorted by their age.

Creator 2010 has a lot to offer for anyone with a high-definition video camcorder, particularly as considerable effort has gone into reducing the amount of time needed to render edited videos. One innovation is that it avoids re-rendering video that has not been changed and it can also take advantage of the features of some graphics cards to speed up rendering times.

Creator can download videos from some online sites such as Youtube, to burn to disc or copy to a portable player. It was confusing to find this in the Copy and Convert Video section rather than Import video section, though. Although it works with a long list of devices it couldn’t convert existing Flash video files we had.

Music can be ripped from CDs – the Advanced Rip is one of the best tools we’ve used for working through a large pile of discs. Naming of tracks was simple enough but the tool for automatically checking the track names online didn’t work as well.

The photo-editing tools were easy to use, and a batch utility makes it very quick to apply filters to lots of photos. There are templates for more ambitious projects from CD labels to greetings cards and photo collages.

Finally, though it may not be as exciting, Creator includes a good backup utility.

Roxio Creator 2010 is a comprehensive a collection of media software, and it’s unlikely that users will be left wanting. Sadly the interfaces of some of the tools, notably the media browser, are in need of some work.

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