Manifest Tech Blog

Yesterday in New York, Acer introduced its new generation of multimedia notebooks -- the desktop replacement 18.4" Aspire 8920G (press release) and more portable 16" Aspire 6920G (press release).

Both feature 16:9 widescreen displays, with the option of Full HD 1920x1080 resolution.

With the acquisition of Gateway last year (joining its eMachines and Packard-Bell brands), Acer is now the world’s third largest PC company.These new notebooks continue Acer's focus on the consumer market, building on its "Gemstone blue" design for image-conscious consumers. For looks, the case features a sexy Holographic 3D cover with a starlit backlight. And for convenient control, the CineDash media console to the left of the keyboard provides a touch-sensitive interface for navigation and media playback.

The blue theme carries through to the integrated Blu-ray disc drives (Super Multi Blu-ray/DVD/CD double-layer), for playback of high-definition widescreen movies. For the full audio experience, the 16" 6920 has stereo speakers plus the Acer Tuba CineBass booster, and the 18.4" 8920 actually has 5 surround speakers plus the bass. There's also an integrated HDMI interface for playback on external HDTVs.

For more media fun, use the available TV Tuner to watch digital television, or the integrated Acer CrystalEye camera and stereo microphones for videoconferencing.

Acer suggested pricing from $900 / $1,700, and said these should ship around April.

More specs below ...

       
Adobe continues to pull off a difficult trick with its Elements applications: providing an accessible interface for novice editors (at under $100) that still provides access to the underlying power and flexibility of its high-end Premiere and Photoshop CS3 tools (at $799 and $649).

The idea with these applications is to provide a growth path as you get more experienced -- so you can start simply, but then not hit a dead end in the application as your editing gets more sophisticated:

- In Premiere Elements 4, you can start with simple drag-and-drop sceneline (storyboard) editing of clips using Movie Themes to automatically apply transitions, music, layouts for titles, credits, and disc menus. Then grow into the multi-track Timeline, synchronizing multiple events with overlays, keyframed animation, and audio mixing.

- In Photoshop Elements 6, you can start in the Organizer browsing your photos and using the one-click Fix tools to automatically clean up and enhance your images. Then use the Guided Editing mode to walk though the steps of improving a photo, and grow into the full Edit mode to make more sophisticated adjustments, including selectively enhancing, retouching flaws, and even removing unwanted elements.

The pricing is the same as the previous version: the individual applications are $99.99 each, or are available together as a bundle for $149.99 (U.S. estimated street price). A version of Photoshop Elements for the Macintosh is expected in early 2008.

Compare video tools in my Video Editing Software Gallery

See my full article: Editing in Adobe Premiere Elements 4 and Photoshop Elements 6

(See also Summary - Premiere Elements 4)
(See also Summary - Photoshop Elements 6)

    Find Adobe Premiere Elements 4 and
    Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 on Amazon.com

More and more consumers are facing growing collections of media stuff -- music and photos and video -- and facing the desire to get organized, be creative, and share their digital content. But there are some many media formats, stored on a bewildering variety of mediums, and so many ways to share, electronic and on physical devices.

Thus the attraction of digital media software suites like Nero 8 Ultra Edition and Roxio Easy Media Creator 10, which have grown from their origins in CD copying and burning to add an array of tools for media management, editing, and sharing, along with more general data backup and archiving.

The latest releases also have have picked up on the hot trends in digital media, building in support for importing and editing new formats, and sharing even more broadly across discs, portable devices, and electronically.

But all these new features results in piling on even more functionality to already-bursting suites: Nero 8 now includes some 22 applications, and EMC 10 has some 12 major applications plus 18 additional utilities/assistants. As a result, these new versions have also focused on refining the user interface, especially with the new look of Windows Vista. They provide a main launcher / control panel to help users choose the task they want to achieve, and now build in direct connections to the product websites for information and updates.

Roxio regards EMC 10 as a substantial upgrade to its flagship suite of digital media applications, with the focus to "enable consumers to quickly and easily turn their photos, video and music into impressive multi-media projects that can be shared on CD, DVD, the Web, or a range of mobile devices."

And Nero has reworked the interface for consumer ease of use, and focused on "extending content beyond the PC" with "easy-to-use features for the creation, management, and protection of multimedia projects" -- To create and edit, convert and share, rip and burn, and backup and protect digital media.

So if you're looking for this kind of all-in-one solution, with the broad range of capabilities -- import, edit, and share -- across images, music, and video -- then check them out.

I've worked on helping to show how they are organized, and how to think about using them --

- Overview article: Digital Media Suites for Mobile Media: Nero 8 and Roxio EMC10

- Nero 8 suite features and visual tour: Summary: Nero 8 Ultra Edition

- Roxio EMC 10 suite features and visual tour: Summary: Roxio Easy Media Creator 10

    Find Nero 8 on Amazon.com
    Find Roxio EMC 10 on Amazon.com

After releasing Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 in September 2007, Roxio now has shipped three subsets of the full EMC suite for specific applications: Disc copying (Easy DVD Copy), DVD authoring (MyDVD), and music creation (RecordNow Music Lab). Released in February 2008, these are designed to "enable consumers to make the most of their digital libraries," so that users can "easily turn photos, videos and music into impressive digital media creations that can be shared on CD, DVD or enjoyed on a variety of portable devices."

Roxio DVD Copy 4 Premier is focused on DVD copying and video conversion ($49).

Copy non-encrypted DVDs, shrink dual-layer DVDs to fit on single-layer discs while excluding unwanted content to optimize video quality. Convert popular audio and video formats for playback on portable devices. Also copy TiVo shows, and copy unprotected videos from the iPod to hard disk.

Roxio MyDVD 10 Premier is designed to make it easy to quickly turn photos and home movies into polished video or DVD productions ($69).

It features MyDVD for creating movie or slideshow discs, VideoWave for video movie creation, and PhotoSuite for photo editing and sharing -- along with associated tools, especially for automated production and enhancement, and sharing to portable devices.

Roxio RecordNow Music Lab 10 / Premier is designed to, rip, convert, transfer and enjoy music on your computer, and share on disc and portable devices ($29, Premier suite for $69 adds DVD music discs).

Collect music from CD, DVD, LP, tape, Internet, and iPod. Capture computer audio, including Internet radio and streaming music, transfer tracks from multiple drives, capture and clean-up analog tracks from LPs and tapes. Organize and automatically tag tracks. Batch convert to digital formats. Automatically create playlists based on your preferred songs.

See full article, including a breakdown of the included applications and utilities:
    Roxio Media Products for Discs, DVD, and Music

See Roxio EMC 10 suite features and visual tour of the individual applications:
    Summary: Roxio Easy Media Creator 10

    Find Roxio EMC 10 on Amazon.com
    Find Roxio Easy DVD Copy 4 on Amazon.com
    Find Roxio RecordNow Music Lab 10 on Amazon.com

Even non-musicians and beginning enthusiasts can collect, organize, mix and mash up, and create new music using today's inexpensive and accessible software tools, such as the Sony Creative Software tools -- ACID Music Studio for music creation and mixing, and Sound Forge Audio Studio for audio recording, editing, and encoding.

    See full article: Sony Audio / Music Studio Software

Sony ACID Music Studio 7 spans music recording, mixing, loop-based creation, and MIDI processing. It's for people creating original music using loops or recording vocals, instruments, or using MIDI -- like DJs and remix artists, home recording studios and musicians, video and multimedia producers, podcast and streaming media creators, educators, trainers, and presenters.

Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio 9 is focused on the end-to-end audio editing -- recording, editing / restoration, encoding, and mastering. It includes interactive Show Me How tutorials to help step though leaning new tasks.

Or step up to a higher-end professional high-end audio production toolset like Adobe Audition 3, through the full workflow of recording, mixing, editing, and mastering audio. Audition includes waveform editing of single clips, multi-track mixing, looping, MIDI, with extensive effects and tools for audio restoration and enhancement.

    See full article: Adobe Audition 3 - Professional Audio Editing and Mixing

    Find Sony Music Studio 7 and Audio Studio 9
    and Adobe Audition 3 on Amazon.com

CyberLink has released the latest version of its well-known DVD player software, CyberLink PowerDVD 8.

As you might expect, this new release adds support for the latest buzzwords in high-def video and audio formats, including Blu-ray Disk playback -- with an online patch to support the full Blu-ray Disc Profile 2 (BD-Live), with picture-in-picture display, networking, and advanced interactivity.

Plus there's AVCHD and MPEG-2 HD video, and HD audio up to 7.1 channels with Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD.

However, the DVD player market is getting rather mature, as these applications are already well-refined for DVD and even general-purpose media playback. PowerDVD supports scads of media formats, provides fun options for video and audio enhancement, and offers helpful features including power-saving playback for notebooks, frame capture, and bookmarking for favorite scenes. What more could it do?

So the next step for CyberLink was to go beyond playback features, and instead augment PowerDVD to enhance the overall movie experience by taking advantage of your computer's storage and Internet connectivity. After all, when you pop in an audio CD on your computer, it automatically looks up the album and artist information, and helps you organize and manage your entire collection -- why not the same for movies?

So CyberLink developed the MoovieLive.com website to store and sync shared movie information with PowerDVD.

When you play a DVD, PowerDVD downloads and displays Movie Information, which you also can edit and update with your personal ratings and reviews.

As you watch DVDs, PowerDVD also updates the list of your personal Movie Collection. You can share your collection (like a playlist of favorite songs), and add other movies that you're interested in from MoovieLive.

You also can get creative with Movie Remix -- mash up scenes from a movie and then add your own creative animated graphics and subtitle text overlays, plus audio clips and voice-overs. And, of course, you can upload and share your remixes on MoovieLive, and download remixes that others have posted -- though since the remix references the movie, you can only play them for DVDs that you own.

MoovieLive is a great idea for the next step in watching DVDs -- taking advantage of the local computer and the wider Internet to enhance the movie-watching experience. However, this initial implementation in PowerDVD 8 is frustrating because the online movie database is only generated by PowerDVD users -- CyberLink did not link the site into a pre-existing DVD database to automatically load movie information. So until the population of users grows significantly, you can type in database fields yourself, or rely on partial uploads you may find from other users.

See my full article for more on these new features, and on how CyberLink has done a good job of refining the PowerDVD interface to make it very accessible for both quick playback and hands-on exploration of a disc:
    Enhanced DVD Movie Watching: CyberLink PowerDVD 8

Adobe has really opened up its development process by releasing public prereleases of its applications -- beta versions posted as free downloads for you to try out.

The Adobe Labs site provides early access to evaluate new and emerging Adobe technologies and products.

Adobe has now posted early looks at some of the new upgrades to its Create Suite 3 collection of professional for print, web, interactive, mobile, video, and film design.

• For video editors, check out the new Adobe Soundbooth for intuitive audio creation and enhancement, with multitrack support and enhanced editing workflow.
• For Web designers, there are betas of Adobe Dreamweaver for web design and Adobe Fireworks to prototype interactive designs. These integrate the common Adobe CS interface with tighter integration among the suite, provide deeper support for standards including CSS, and support Adobe AIR to author multiplatform desktop applications.
• And for all of us, there's a prerelease of Adobe Flash Player 10, with 3D animation, deeper support from Adobe effects and text technology, and enhanced performance.

So go ahead and try these out -- for a limited time until they expire.

See my Video Editing Software Gallery for information and links to video editing tools.

    Find Adobe CS3 Production Premium on Amazon.com

    Find Adobe CS3 Master Collection on Amazon.com

Details on new features below

Pinnacle Studio 12 was released in June 2008, providing simplified video editing and DVD creation for entry-level users, with versions for editing high-definition video and bundled with additional pro-style tools and a green-screen backdrop for chroma key overlays.

The previous Studio 11, released last year, lead the way with solid support for the new high-def video formats, with responsive editing of AVCHD and HDV video, and burning to HD DVD disc format. Studio 12 extends the HD support with burning to Blu-ray disc, in AVCHD format with menus, and BD-MV with motion menus.

Even better, Studio (like other new consumer video editors) can burn high-def video to regular DVD discs, which then play on the Sony PS3 (and other Blu-ray players) -- So you can watch your own HD productions on your widescreen TV without requiring special new hardware.

Studio 12 also includes a variety of welcome productivity enhancements for editing, adds support for more cameras and formats (including Dolby AC3), and performance improvements.

But the big news is the new Montage feature, which creates professionally-designed multi-source composites. Choose a themed template -- Openings, Segues, Endings -- and drag and drop video clips and photos. Studio inserts Hollywood style multi-layered effects with picture-in-picture overlays, animated graphics, titles and audio. It's fun and easy.

See full article: Summary: Pinnacle Studio 12 for details on new features, the Studio interface, and the editing workflow.

See my Video Editing Software Gallery for information and links to video editing tools.

    Find Pinnacle Studio 12 on Amazon.com

Adobe is providing a sneak peek of some of the elements of the next major release of its Create Suite collection of design and development tools for print, video, and web.

The Adobe Labs site has beta versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks for web design, plus Soundbooth for audio editing.

Adobe Soundbooth is designed for cleaning and sweetening audio clips, plus music soundtrack generation.

The current version, Soundbooth CS3, includes a powerful Score tool to create professional-sounding royalty-free music beds, similar to SmartSound Sonicfire.

You choose a score from a library of different genres, and Soundbooth automatically generates a coherent music clip with the duration adjusted to fit your production. And you can customize further -- the Soundbooth scores are actually built as multi-track mixes, with parameters to adjust the depth of the mix, with more layers of sound. Plus you can keyframe the parameters for more control, for example to simplify the mix during scenes with dialog.

Then with Soundbooth CS4, Adobe has introducing a new kind of score -- Environment scores that are multi-track sound effects. Instead of automatically generating music in a particular style, you can use scores to generate sound effects to add environmental texture to your mix, again matching the desired duration.

Plus, environment scores are also constructed as multi-track mixes, so you can layer in more elements as desired. For example, with the CityStreet score, Intensity controls the amount of traffic driving by, Construction adds noise from trucks, plus Rain mixes in drops and thunder.

Soundbooth Scores provide a quick and efficient way to add background music to a video production to help develop the general mood or feel of a piece. The new environmental scores in Soundbooth CS4 extend this idea further for ambient sound design to match your visuals. Then use the new multitrack mixer to automatically generate and customize additional tracks of music and sound -- layers of layers of texture for your production.

So download the Soundbooth CS4 beta to try it out.

See full article with additional links: Adobe Soundbooth CS4 Beta

    Find Adobe Soundbooth CS3
    and Adobe CS3 Production Premium on Amazon.com

You can try out the beta of Adobe Soundbooth CS4, to clean and sweeten audio clips, and to automatically generate music soundtracks (see previous post).

But there's another less-obvious addition beyond editing individual clips -- a focus on collecting and tracking metadata associated with your clips, to make it easier to search and manage your growing collection of clips and projects.

As a bonus, Soundbooth now supports speech-to-text transcription -- making it easier to search to find a particular clip, and to shuttle though clips to find a specific edit point while you watch the associated words highlighted in the transcript.

The transcription process is not magic -- It works best with professional-recorded broadcast-quality clips, and less well with more challenging clips. The product supports multiple language models, including variants such as American or British accents.

But, argues Lawson Hancock, product manager for Soundbooth in his Inside Sound blog, it's not just about the accuracy of the transcription.

... "Even with a 50% accurate transcript, the speech engine will capture enough keywords to enable you to easily search through your audio stream. ... Speech search is about speeding up the editing process by enabling you to easily locate specific words in your audio clips."

The transcript is only part of the extensive metadata collected and managed by Soundbooth CS4, and shared with other Adobe applications. The idea is to capture information about clips as soon as they are imported or created, and then augment and share the data though the production process.

Based on the Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), data about each clip is embedded and stored in the file itself when saved. (Some file formats including AIFF & MPEG do not support embedded XMP metadata, which is instead saved in a separate .xmp file stored with the file.)

The power of metadata then grows over time as you expand your library of clips, as you can quickly find specific clips by searching for very detailed attributes. We are beginning to move beyond organizing files by folders, or date and project, and start to think about them in terms of how they were created, processed, and saved.

The Adobe Soundbooth CS4 beta is available as a download from the Adobe Labs site.

See full article with additional links: Adobe Soundbooth CS4 Beta

    Find Adobe Soundbooth CS3
    and Adobe CS3 Production Premium on Amazon.com