Sony Imagination Studio Suite 2 Review

Sony media suite contains five sophisticated editing programs. Let’s find out how it’s worth the money.

With so much audio and video software available online, it might seem pointless to actually pay for media software. But while free programs are great for simple editing tasks, they lack the more sophisticated tools and effects found in paid-for-versions. 

Sony’s Imagination Studio Suite 2 brings together five of the company’s most popular editing products in one package. It contains a raft of advanced features, giving you the tools to create and edit video, audio and photos to an incredibly high standard.

First things first, Imagination Studio Suite 2 is absolutely bursting with features and contains a staggering amount of technical detail that will inspire advanced users.

Each of suite’s products –ACID Music Studio, photo Go, Sound Forge Studio, Vegas Movie Studio and DVD Architect Studio-can be used separately, but come into their won when used in combination. For example, to make photo-slideshow, we used Photo Go, ACID Music Studio and Sound Forge Studio for the backing track and Architect Studio to create a DVD.

Top-Quality Features

The Vegas Movie Studio’s Explorer panel links directly to your content, which means you don’t have to go through long menu paths when importing. The other editing panels are handily organized in easy-to-reach tabs on the left-hand side and there are dozens of outstanding customizable effects and transitions, plus a brilliant media generator for creating titles and credits. 

These top-quality features make it worth splashing out on Sony’ suite. Most free programs simply can’t complete, offering tacky and cheat-looking effects instead. Being able to add and edit slideshows effortlessly also sets it part from free versions and some other paid-for rivals.

Although importing media content and rendering projects drastically slowed down our PC, occasionally causing it to freeze, the status the timeline and adding transitions and effects was very quick and video playback was flawless, with no lag.

Tricky Music Editing

Unfortunately, editing with the ACID Music Studio isn’t as easy. You can create and mix tracks from live vocals and instruments, and import audio from CD’s and the web, but simple tasks such as adjusting the volume on a specific part of a track is unnecessarily tricky. The screen layout is cluttered and chaotic, and while the tutorials tell you in general terms what each section controls, we were completely overwhelmed by the array of buttons, tabs and faders.

This is probably why Sony included the much simpler Sound Forge Audio Studio as an audio alternative. It has enough easy-to-use features to satisfy most of your editing needs, presented in a way that doesn’t feel confusing.

Similarly, the Photo Go software is simple to use. It looks and works like Google’s Picasa, containing standard tools including red-eye reduction, hue, saturation, brightness and crop options. But it doesn’t have any features that you won’t find in free alternatives.

Finally, exporting your content with DVD Architect Studio is a breeze, whether you’re saving it to your hard disk or your phone, or uploading it to the web. However, it’s worth watching the video tutorials first to understand how to make changes to menus, themes and buttons.You can download its trial version.

Requirements of Sony Imagination Studio Suite 2

• Microsoft Windows XP (Service Pack 3), Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) or Windows 7.

• 1 GHz processor (multi-core or multiprocessor CPU recommended for HD).

• 1 GB of hard disk space.

• 2 GB of memory.

• OHCI-compatible i.LINK connector / IEEE-1394DV card (for DV capture and print-to-tape).

• Windows compatible sound card.

• DVD-ROM drive (for installation from a DVD only). 

• Supported CD-recordable drive (for CD burning only).

• Supported DVD-R/-RW / +R / +RW drive (for DVD burning only).

• Supported BD-R /-RE drive (for Blue-ray disc burning)

• Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0

Pure Music

Pure, which makes internet and digital radios, is launching its own music-streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify and Sony’s Music Unlimited from December, PURE Music subscribers will be able to stream millions of tracks online for 4.99 pound a month.  Like Spotify service, which costs the same price, it doesn’t contain adverts. Sony’s service is 1 pound cheaper, but it doesn’t let you create playlists.

On first impression, PURE Music doesn’t offer anything you can’t get from Spotify. But the two key attractions of PURE Music are its music store, where you can buy tracks (from 99p) and albums (from 3.99 pound), and the ability to play your music through PURE internet radios. You can also play music on your Smartphone and PC.

You can search for specific tracks, artists and genres, or browse ‘Top tracks’ and ‘top albums’. However, we found it much faster and easier to do this from the website than from our radio. You can create playlists on your radio, but because using the radio dials to search is such hard work, we made them all on the website, which has an easy drag-and-drop system. 

Buying tracks isn’t as simple as it is on iTunes. First, you have to tag tracks, which can only be done as they’re playing, and then go to My Tagged Tracks. Click each individually; click the checkout cart and only then can you buy them.

Once you’ve found a track, you can play it within the current browser window or in a pop-out player, add it to a playlist or buy it from the same screen. Spotify annoyed a lot users lately by forcing new members to have a Facebook account, so PURE may be a good alternative for anyone looking to jump ship. The addition of a store makes it an attractive all-rounder, and will appeal to people who don’t like streaming music on  one device and buying it on another. 

Windows 8 and Desktop PC Users

Microsoft has been criticized forthcoming release of Windows 8 operating system, with Pc experts saying that its touchscreen features focus too much on tablet devices and neglect the needs of desktop pc users.

Windows 8, which is due to launch in 2012, was previewed by Microsoft at the recent Computex trade show in Taiwan. One of the most significant new features is its ‘tiled’ touchscreen interface, similar to that used on Windows Phone 7, the company’s operation system for mobile devices.

Microsoft wants Windows 8 to work easily on all types of devices, from desktop PCs to laptops, tablets and smartphones. Though you won’t need a touchscreen computer to use Windows 8, you will need to learn new ’gestures’ with your mouse, such as quick sideways swipes, to navigate around the Operating System. 

Some Technology analyst’s doubt how easy or satisfying it will be to use Windows 8 on a desktop PC. An analytical web user said: “New Widows is targeted firmly at a touch screen interface. It will doubtless be possible to use new Windows with mouse, but you just know that the new user interface will really only be at home on a touch device, or a device with a touch interface- a largish trackpad on a laptop, or a desktop trackpad panel.” According to StatCounter 33.2% of computers worldwide uses Windows 7.

Technology blogger john Gruber, writing on his Daring Fireball blog, contrasted Microsoft’s approach to Apple’s which keeps its desktop operating system, Mac OS X, separate to its mobile platform, iOS5. “Apple’s radical notion is that touchscreen personal computers should make severely different trade-offs than traditional computers-and that you can’t design one system that does it all. Windows 8 is trying to have it all, and I don’t think that can be done,” Gruber wrote.

However, there is some good news for desktop PC users planning to upgrade to Windows 8, because many customers won’t need to upgrade their hardware, windows 8 beta  download  may be available for old customers.  Microsoft said. “We have extended the trend we started with Windows 7 of keeping our system requirements either flat or reducing them over time. So Windows 8 will be able to run on wide range of machines because it will have the same system requirements or lower as Windows 7, “said Mycroft’s Michael Angiulo.

Format Factory Review

Format Factory is a freeware multimedia files converter through this powerful converter you can easily convert your images, audio and video files from one popular format to another. It supports media files format use in portable devices like IPOD, IPhone, Blackberry and PSP and minimize the size of multimedia files. You can quickly repair your damage audio or video files. The software contains build in 50 different languages translation support and you can also rip your DVD.


Installation Wizard

The installation process is very simple. The overall installation required 2.4 MB disk space. The default installation settings automatically install ask.com search bar tool and you will see a shortcut icon of e Bay on desktop. It is better to deselect these options during installation wizard if you don’t want to install them.

Easy to Use

The software contain user-friendly interface and you don’t need to do any extra configuration or settings after installation process. The software has drag and drop it feature and there is no file menu available in Format factory software. The other way is to click on application left side buttons to select desire files. Once you select the file than simply open that file and modify output settings according to your needs like video & audio format, video and audio streams, and watermarks. You can also configure audio channels, amount of volume, birate, sample rate and work with subtitles.

The software saves your time and quickly done conversion process of your desire files. While you converting any file you can simply starts or stop the process without any problem. Format factory convert one image to a different format within a second. Similarly, by using the same tools you can convert your audios and video’s file with impressive speed.

The software is easy to minimize on system tray and run with full configured mode. Once your conversation process completed a popup on system tray notifies you about the finish task. You can easily configure different codecs with this application by using its advanced options.

Format Factory is a free to download and compatible with Windows XP / 2003 / Vista and Windows 7.