Media Maker 8: Digital Creativity Suite for Regular People

Over the past few years we’ve bought a lot of specialized software for photo manipulation, video editing, music capture and CD/DVD burning. The boxes sit in our home office library. The software ends up sitting on our hard drive until we upgrade to a new computer. They are probably real good at doing the job but frankly we’re not really interested in making movies for a living or creating music for the world to share. And our kids seem to jump from one project to another so anything that takes time to learn and use just doesn’t seem to interest them.

The idea of having a software suite that fits with our kids fast paced digital lifestyle and a product that would let us meet all of our family’s digital content needs seemed to be exactly what we were looking for.

Introduced by NTI (NewTech Infosystems) the Media Maker 8 package has just about everything you need to capture, edit, burn and enjoy music, photos and videos. We enjoyed using the company’s CD & DVD Maker which has been one of the most reliable, versatile disc burning packages we’ve found, so getting the more robust suite seemed like a sure thing.

First thing you notice when you open the suite is that there is nothing intimidating about the NTI product. The opening user interface screen is so unintimidating you feel you’re going to have a great user experience…and you will.

The company calls the UI an EasyStep interface and it really is. Just click on the image of the suite area you want to work in and you go there immediately. The software lets you quickly access the audio, video, photo, data and utility work areas.

Navigation is a snap. You can easily move from one job to another without sacrificing performance, reliability, flexibility and usage versatility. We were a little surprised to see the package also included backup software – a logical and often overlooked content solution since hard drives will die on you and that means all your vital and irreplaceable photos, videos and music will be gone forever. You might think of the backup solution as content insurance and you only have to have it to save your audio/video work once and you realize it is worth the under $80 price of the complete suite.

Music, More

Our son jumped right into the audio section and began using the NTI Ripper and Digital Jack to rip/archive his music as well as playback his music collection.

NTI Ripper has it all including the ability to carry out on-the-fly batch conversions of audio file formats on your hard drive. There’s no need to manually name files. File Composer automatically names the audio files by artist, song title, track number, and album name. It also includes Music DVD tools that let you create your own music DVDs complete with album cover, artist photos, trivia and song names.

In addition to supporting all the popular audio formats – .MP3, .WMA, .WAV and OGG, NTI Ripper makes it easy to automatically rip and name an entire audio CD to virtually any attached storage device, including iPod, iPhone MP3 players, flash media, hard drives, NAS devices or smartphone.

NTI Digital Jack makes it easy to listen to digital music files from a PC. Intuitive to use, it offers a wide assortment of playback features including shuffle and preset equalizer options such as Jazz, Classical, Hip-hop, and more. It also includes cross fade and volume normalization features.

Photos, Videos

The video application doesn’t go overboard with advanced features and capabilities which we found very refreshing. For us the idea of getting the content from the camera to viewing it as quickly as possible is where the real fun is – not spending a lot of time editing/authoring.

While you can go in and individually work on the photo and video segments, it will automatically adds effects and transitions which synchronize with your background music. The photo slideshow capability makes it quick and easy to produce a photo slideshow. In almost no time you can add personalized audio, super transitions and very professional looking special effects including the ability to pan, zoom, rotate, crop and add text to the photos.

The software includes a video converter that converts videos for use on an iPod, PSP, iPhone/smartphone or other portable video players.

NTI has long had a DVD Fit capability that lets you store 8.5GB dual-layer DVD movies onto a single 4.7GB single layer disc without having to burn the content to two discs. In addition, while the software does support next generation Blu-Ray discs it also writes to all types of DVDR media including the new Double Layer (DL) 8.5GB discs. This means you can store up to 4 hours of theater quality, play anywhere video, 120 hours of MP3 audio on a single disc.

NTI’s intelligent software actually detects the correct speed required for your drive and media. The software automatically chooses the correct writing method and includes CD/DVD overburn support (you can burn to the very edge of the disc for more capacity) as well as buffer underrun and built-in caching.

Content Protection

With almost everything being digital today – documents, photos, video, music – the addition of a backup/recovery solution is something you never appreciate…until you need it!

The NTI Backup NOW lets you backup files and folders...or everything. It even backs up emails and important files and was worth the cost of the complete package when the wife accidentally deleted several files. Users can schedule full or partial backups. Like the company’s more comprehensive backup/recovery software, it includes 128/256-bit data encryption and password protection as well as email notification and migration. For people like ourselves who tend to forget things, the software can be set for scheduled unattended backups (full, incremental or differential).

The software features a wizard-driven interface and on-the-fly data compression capabilities. The compression makes it possible to store up to 1.4GB of vital data on a CD or up to 9.4GB on a single-sided DVD disc. Because today’s hard drives are large and getting larger, the software features automatic media spanning over multiple discs as well as drive spanning over multiple target drives for a complete, unattended backup of the hard drive.

Green Product

NTI probably didn’t jump on the conservation bandwagon as a part of the overwhelming green movement, but Media Maker 8 had a feature we thought was “logical” and one that made our kids appreciate the company.

Once you’ve set up a task, the company designed in a capability that lets you walk away from the computer and let the editing/authoring/burning steps go through the entire process…even overnight.

They included a feature that will automatically put the computer in hibernation or standby mode when the work is complete. Or if you want, you can set it so the PC will turn off or log off the computer when the task is done.

The NTI Media Maker 8 works with Windows 2000/XP/Vista systems and is a great value at under $80. For more information visit www.ntius.com.

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