Manifest Tech Blog

Summary of stats on the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show, held January 8-11 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Some 140K attendees -- 2,700 exhibitors -- 1.8 million square feet of exhibit space.

See CES 2007 Summary

More power! But also easier to use. More formats and more devices! And yet drag-and-drop simplicity. It's a tough challenge for the developers of consumer-oriented video editing software. We want to import from any camcorder, edit with ease and sophistication, share to any portable device, and burn nice-looking DVDs -- and not have to spend any time fussing and learning about the software.

The latest evolution in this trend is Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, announced in September 2006. In this release, Premiere Elements still keeps much of the underlying power of Adobe's professional Premiere Pro product, but further simplifies the editing experience by adopting more features from traditional consumer-only editing, including Sceneline (storyboard) layout and direct editing in the Monitor window.

Full article: Easier Editing: Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 is targeted to serious hobbyists, people who are beyond beginners and are proud of their photos.

The new versions of Adobe's Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Premiere Elements 3.0 became available in October 2006 for US $99.99 each, or bundled together for $149.99.

Full article: Summary of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0

So many video formats -- discs and files, video and audio, set-top and PC and portable, high-res HDV to TV-quality MPEG to tiny portable screens. How can you make sense of them all, figure out the right format for a particular purpose, and then get your clips converted properly? For discs there's DVD -- R and RW, dash and plus, single and double layer, and even VR. And for files there's Windows Media Video (WMV), the MPEG-1 and -2 standards, and now MPEG-4, plus AVC and 3GPP versions. Arrg!

Sometimes you don't want to edit video and discs -- you just want to assemble, copy, and convert them. This calls for a dedicated tool like the new InterVideo DVD Copy 5 for Windows, which can grab video from discs and/or files, convert among a zillion formats, and deliver the results by burning discs or creating new movie files.

Full article: Video and DVD Formats: Copying and Converting with InterVideo DVD Copy 5 Platinum