Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Pegasys, Inc., the company that makes digital video easy, announces the upcoming availability of its TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4 software. It's the perfect, all-in-one media authoring solution for any video enthusiast. It is easy enough for a beginner to understand, and sophisticated enough to meet the demands of an experienced videographer. The U.S. release date is scheduled for November 13th, 2008...With the capability to author the high-capacity Blu-ray format, users can enjoy high definition videos with menus without worrying about disc capacity. This allows the saving of high-definition videos taken with an AVCHD or HDV camcorder and keeping it in high definition. Add in support for high quality 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound or linear PCM audio (up to 192kHz/20bit) and the result is a superb audio/video presentation."

Aha - so this is the mystery product that they were teasing us all about a few weeks back. I have to admit that I'm confused by this product - it seems like it has a lot in common with TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0, and I'm not sure if you'd want to buy this if you have Xpress 4.0, because most of us have DVD burning applications already. I'm not alone in my confusion - our very own onlydarksets from the forums has posted a spreadsheet trying to make sense of how TMPGEnc products differ from each other.

"New Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 7 & Adobe Premiere® Elements 7 software with Photoshop.com Plus** membership combines two powerful yet easy-to-use products, so you can do so much more with your photos and videos. Easily create extraordinary photos and incredible movies, use them together in cinematic slide shows and other creations, and stay connected with your favorite people and memories."

Photoshop Elements is a superb program, and provides most of the photo editing needs for beginner to enthusiast users - a good number of people that dish out the megabucks for Photoshop CS3 would be well served by Photoshop Elements. It's a bit hard to decode exactly what's new, but looking at this page, I'd say they've added the ability to combine a mask with a paint effect - they're calling it Adobe Smart Brush. Might be dodging and burning on steroids? The description is pretty vague. They have Adobe Photomerge as well, which allows you to combine several near-identical photos to get the best parts of each one. It's listed as "new" but this feature is in Photoshop Elements 6, so Adobe calling it new is confusing. Adobe really needs to come up with a better list of what's new and what's not - they can look to Ulead for how it should be done.

One of the new features of this software, and seemingly what they put most of their efforts into, is actually a software service: Photoshop.com Plus. If you sign up for the yearly service, you get template updates, 20 GB of online storage for your photos and videos, online album sharing, and the rather-vague-sounding "access your photos and videos from anywhere". Read more...

I just finished making three DVDs using Nero Vision , and after burning the third one I thought "I guess I should make sure they turned out ok before I give them away". I didn't expect to have any problems, because the three source WMV files were perfect. Imagine my surprise when I tested the first DVD with Nero Showtime and discovered that the audio drops out after the first 90 seconds. I tested the DVD again inside Windows Media Player, and the results were the same. GAH! I hate it when software fails to produce the results it's supposed to - Nero Vision gave me no indication of a problem with the transcoding, the preview was perfect, and all three burns completed without error. And, yes, I checked two of the three discs and the problem was the same on both. I'm now re-doing the project with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0...and if that doesn't work, I swear I'll switch to Sony Vegas right away!