Product Reviews

There are so many ways to be creative with your PC: editing video, manipulating digital photos, making beautiful music. But unless you've spent the last few years as a special effects expert for Disney, you might find getting to grips with all this technical wizardry a bit daunting. Luckily, though, Roxio has redesigned its creativity software, Creator, to make the job much simpler.

When you start Creator, you're presented with a main window from which you can easily open any projects you've been working on, or start a new one. If you're starting a new job you don't have to guess which bit of the program you need - instead, you just select the task you want to perform from the options at the top of the window. Creator then opens the correct software for the job.

The music options allow you to copy an audio CD to another CD; to copy the music on a CD to your hard disk in MP3, WAV, OGG or WMA format; or to create a new CD from files on your hard disk.

As with all of the options in Creator 7, the software doesn't completely guide you through every step of the task - instead it just sets up the correct program, ready for you to choose your options and set the process into motion. The options for data CDs are similar: you can copy a data CD or choose to create a new disc by dragging and dropping the files you want to burn. Creator 7 also includes a simple back-up function, which lets you create

ADVERTISEMENT

back-up tasks complete with scheduled reminders and encryption to protect your documents.

Creator can also import pictures from a digital camera. The Edit and Fix option provides tools for cropping, rotating and titling images as well as automatically correcting problems with exposure and saturation. There is also a tool for removing red-eye from your photos. Creator can help you e-mail your photos or turn them into greetings cards, and you can even add transition effects to create a slideshow, which you can then e-mail or burn to a disc for sharing.

Creator includes all the features of Roxio's home-movie editing software, VideoWave 7 Pro. Using Creator's video-editing functions you can import video from a camcorder connected to your PC. The Cinemagic mode makes creating a professional-looking home movie easy: you just select video files, a soundtrack and a style, and the software uses the elements you've selected to create a finished video.

Of course, you can also start with a blank page and put together the video and soundtrack yourself. This feature is nowhere near as good as specialised packages like Pinnacle's Studio, but is enough to help beginners learn the basic techniques of editing film on a timeline.

Once you've made your home movie masterpiece, there are lots of options for burning it to DVD. Creating a DVD Video disc from scratch is pretty straightforward - you just follow the Help wizard. Copying a disc, though, is a bit fiddly, particularly if you also want to make changes to the disc you're copying. That's a shame, as making on-disc changs is one of the most useful features of new writeable DVD formats.

Roxio Creator 7 is easy to use, and great if you're new to many of its functions and need a bit help finding you way. You get an incredible amount of stuff for you money, too. VideoWave 7 Pro alone costs more than £60 - so to get all of its functions in this package, along with CD-burning, photo-editing and back-up applications, is fantastic value.