Roxio Creator 2011 review

In the world of gaming and movies, 3D is the latest thing and it can look spectacular, given the correct treatment. It's even made its way out of the cinema and into everyday life, with Sky broadcasting sport in 3D, and some manufacturers beginning to build 3D functions into cameras and lenses. Roxio Creator 2011 takes this progression to its logical conclusion, adding a handful of tools and features to its media suite in a bid to help home users create their own 3D content.

In terms of discrete tools, the first you're likely to play with is the 3D photo editor. Fire it up from the familiar Roxio dashboard and you get a simple dialog allowing you to either convert an existing 2D image, or import left and right-eye images and output an old-fashioned anaglyph cyan/red JPEG file.

Results are mixed: the former method adds a subtle separation effect that sometimes creates a feeling of depth, and sometimes doesn't; the latter is more fiddly, but ultimately more successful, allowing you to take two shots of the same scene - slightly offset from one another - then adjust the separation in a separate window.

The bundled Roxio CinePlayer also converts 2D movies (up to 720p, but not beyond) to anaglyph 3D on-the-fly. As with the 2D photo conversion, however, it struggles to impart a feeling of depth.

Elsewhere, things get advanced, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the VideoWave movie editor. Here you can import 2D and convert to 3D, or import ready-made 3D footage, edit it as you would a standard 2D video, then export it. Instead of just anaglyph, however, you can output to a variety of industry-standard 3D formats: from standard side-by-side and one over the other, to interlaced 3D ready for playback on a 3D projector. There's even the option to upload directly to YouTube 3D.

It's interesting, and fun for a while too, and if 3D cameras were mainstream we could see the point; after all, there's no other consumer video editor we've seen that offers this feature. Alas, they aren't, and the other 3D features are little more than playthings; they'll divert your attention for a while, but you'll quickly lose interest.