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Microsoft® Expression® Media

Reviewers Guide

July 2007

For more information, press only:

Haley Pearson

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide

(425) 638-7000

haleyp@

Rapid Response Team

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide

(503) 443-7070

rrt@

Microsoft Corp.

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, WA 98052-6399

© 2007 Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corp. on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.

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Introduction 4

Introducing Expression Media 4

Expression Media Customer Profile 5

Expression Media Key Messages 6

Overview of Feature Areas 7

Effortless Organization 7

Seamless Workflow Integration 7

Professional Presentations and Delivery 8

Image and Video Editing 8

Top 10 Reasons to Buy Expression Media 9

Hands-on Exercises 11

About This Section 11

System Requirements 19

Introduction

Welcome to the reviewers guide for Microsoft® Expression® Media. The purpose of this document is to assist your evaluation of the product.

The Microsoft Expression family of products is being introduced by Microsoft Corp. to address the needs of the those in the professional design community who want to design and create content based on the Microsoft technology stack. Whether that content is for the desktop or the Web, the Expression products will allow designers to fully engage with developers to finally bridge the gap in the designer-developer workflow. This will bring together the best minds in design and development to create applications and sites with a focus on a great user experience.

A great user experience is a goal that Microsoft is passionate about, and Windows Vista® and the 2007 Microsoft Office system are both examples of what can be achieved in this space. The combination of the Expression tools for designers with Visual Studio® 2005 for developers will see the birth of a new era in software and Web site development with a great user experience at its center.

Introducing Expression Media

Expression Media makes digital asset management easy by enabling creative professionals to keep their focus where it belongs — on being creative. With drag-and-drop import capability for more than 100 file types, Expression Media is the perfect choice for centralizing digital assets, including images, video, audio, graphics, fonts, and HTML and XML files created in Expression Studio.

Expression Media unifies the asset management process across tools in the Expression Studio and across designer and developer collaboration because both can use Expression Media as the central view and repository for the overall assets of a project.

As a professional workflow tool, Expression Media provides a versatile way of managing these files and applying metadata to make it possible to search through vast quantities of files by a variety of criteria, yet easily retrieve what you need later. Batch processing and other automated functions keep media management time to a minimum.

The key point is that Expression Media does not store files, it stores links to them. So there’s no need to move or make copies of files to include them in a catalog — you simply tell Expression Media where they are by using one of the import options, a huge time saver.

Expression Media Customer Profile

Expression Media will be used worldwide by creative professionals and anyone with the need to organize digital files:

• Web designers

• Software designers

• Interactive designers

• Print designers

• Illustrators, animators and graphic artists

• Photographers

• Architects

Expression Media Key Messages

Tame Your Media

Imagine how much more you’d accomplish if you could just find what you’re looking for. Expression Media makes digital asset management easy. Simply drag and drop to import more than 100 media formats, including digital RAW files. Even when your originals are offline, the Expression Media visual catalogs allow you to browse, search and annotate your assets.

Workflow Is Enhanced

Handle lots of files, fast, with Expression Media, the professional’s choice. Rename, convert or tag hundreds of files at a time with sophisticated batch processing, or use powerful search features to instantly find and retrieve your digital media assets. Edit images and keep track of your changes with version control, while folder watching keeps your catalogs up to date.

Presentation Is Everything

Impress your audience with slide shows, videos and Web galleries. Expression Media can export your assets in exactly the format and size your clients need, with professionally designed presentation templates. With Expression Media Encoder, you can convert and publish video to reach a broad, cross-platform audience.

Overview of Feature Areas

Effortless Organization

Make digital asset management easy with Expression Media. Simply drag and drop to import more than 100 media formats, including digital RAW files. Start working with your files right away while Expression Media quickly creates full-screen previews. Store your files anywhere — in shared folders, on CDs, hard drives or DVDs — and use integrated search tools to find them in seconds. Wherever your files are, Expression Media will keep track of them all. Even when your originals are offline, the Expression Media visual catalogs allow you to browse, search and annotate your assets.

Visual catalogs. Add up to 128,000 files per catalog, organized just the way you like. Color labels and sets help you sort and manage them all.

Drag-and-drop importing. Add just the assets you want to a particular catalog, whether it’s the entire contents of your camera’s media card or a few video files from a hard drive.

More than 100 file formats. Open all those files without worry. Expression Media supports all the file formats you need, and probably a few that you don’t.

Fast import. Don’t wait for progress bars. Expression Media was built to handle thousands of files with ease.

Screen-size previews. See what you’re looking at more clearly with large preview images, which are generated when your files are imported.

Find files anywhere. Let Expression Media keep track of the location of your files, across all your hard drives, CDs or media cards. Searches can be done within the current catalog, open catalogs, recent catalogs, or across all catalogs in a folder, and popular searches can be saved for later use.

Offline workflow. Catalogs can be searched, browsed or annotated even when the originals are offline, and changes you make will be synchronized later.

Seamless Workflow Integration

Stick with the workflow that works for you, and Expression Media will fill in the gaps. Support for RAW formats from the most popular cameras and industry-standard metadata formats means that your metadata is already there. Keep keywords consistent with custom dictionaries — just drag and drop to quickly tag thousands of files. Rename an entire folder of files or change their format easily with batch conversion, or use flexible scripting tools to get tedious tasks out your way. Make sure all your precious digital assets are protected with built-in archiving and backup features.

RAW formats. Choose a tool that imports files from the most popular camera manufacturers, such as Canon Inc. and Nikon Corp.

Windows and Macintosh. Work on whichever platform is most convenient, and share catalogs with colleagues on either operating system.

Industry-standard metadata. Import your files and add EXIF data to your tags. Add, edit or export metadata in IPTC, XMP or Dublin Core formats to make sharing of information easier among groups of all kinds. Edit your images in Adobe Photoshop, and Expression Media will automatically update your meta tags.

Color profiles. Preserve color integrity in your images with full support for ICC color profiles throughout your workflow.

Drag-and-drop tagging. Add tags and keywords to your assets in just a few seconds. Custom keyword dictionaries let you keep tags consistent throughout your workgroup.

Batch conversion and scripting. Kiss tedious tasks goodbye with powerful batch-processing and scripting features. Rename, resize or reformat hundreds of files at a time.

Backup and archiving. Burn CD and DVD archives of your assets on the Windows® and Macintosh operating systems. Expression Media will even analyze your drive to suggest locations for backup files.

Expression Studio integration. Add chapter markers to video or prepare files for use in Expression Web or Expression Blend.

Professional Presentations and Delivery

Sharing is what it’s all about. Publish and distribute media with cross-platform slide shows, video, and Web galleries, or quickly export media into multiple formats for delivery to your client. Produce high-quality contact sheets and prints of any size and layout. Use professionally designed templates, or customize to suit your own style. Deliver Web-ready video for interactive Microsoft Silverlight™ experiences.

Professional presentations. Choose from professionally designed customizable presentation templates to showcase your files in beautiful Web galleries or hard-copy layouts.

Asset export and repurposing. Deliver files to your clients and colleagues in whatever format, size or resolution they ask for while preserving your originals.

Video encoding and compression. Export video in one of several formats using the built-in Expression Media Encoder.

Sophisticated slide shows. Specify timing, scaling and transition effects for your slide shows, and even cue audio files to accompany your images or video.

Image and Video Editing

Save time by taking care of basic image-editing tasks such as rotating, cropping and resizing from right inside Expression Media. Color management profiles are preserved throughout, or you can quickly adjust levels, sharpness, brightness or color balance yourself. With Expression Media Encoder, re-encoding video is as easy as converting images. Apply filters or add watermark logos to your video files, or re-encode video for optimized playback on the Web or Windows Media®-based handheld devices.

Basic image editing. Fix those images without leaving Expression Media. Quickly rotate, resize or crop your photos, or adjust color balance, sharpness or brightness.

Resolution management. Generate files at exactly the size you want, from large-format printing to optimized Web images.

Color management. Make color fidelity part of your workflow with support for ICC color profiles for JPEG, TIFF, PICT and Adobe Photoshop documents. Preserve existing profile information, or use the Expression Media intelligent batch profiler to assign new profiles to multiple images based on their color space.

Video encoding and compression. Browse and annotate video in formats including MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media Video (WMV) or digital video (DV). Add watermark or logo keys to add your brand to your content.

Cross-platform Web-ready video. Publish high-quality, high-resolution video for immersive media playback on the Web.

Top 10 Reasons to Buy Expression Media

1. Catalog media visually.

Expression Media enables you to create visual databases of media, called catalogs, containing references of up to 128,000 files per catalog. Store your files anywhere — in shared folders, on CDs, hard drives or DVDs — and use integrated search tools to find them in seconds. Expression Media will keep track of them all. Even when your originals are offline, the Expression Media visual catalogs allow you to browse, search and annotate your assets.

2. Organize content quickly.

Drag-and-drop organizer allows you to quickly and easily import, organize, annotate and classify large volumes of your digital media files. Expression Media includes file system integration features such as automatic synchronization and folder watching.

3. Encode media for Silverlight.

Easily import WMV, Windows Media Audio (WMA), AVI, QuickTime and more into Expression Media Encoder (Windows-only feature), fine-tune your VC-1 settings, and choose your favorite Microsoft Silverlight player template to output a Web-ready Silverlight experience.

4. Browse and play media in more than 100 formats.

There are five views in which to review images, listen to music or watch movies: List, Thumbnail, Media, Light Table and Slide Show. Search and sort media by any criteria and even rename media files and folders directly within Expression Media.

5. Review, compare, edit and enhance.

Select up to six files to compare side-by-side in full-screen view. Built-in Image Editor provides a wide array of tools, from cropping and removal of red-eye to creating duotones and adjusting color balance and several auto enhancements for quick and easy touch-ups of your images. Image Editor includes support for built-in color profiles for greater color accuracy throughout the creative process.

6. Add and edit metadata.

Extract or create thumbnail and preview images from your digital files for quick visual cataloging. Import or export, add or edit metadata from those files for fast searching and sorting. Utilize industry-standard metadata formats such as EXIF, IPTC and XMP for faultless interchange with other creative applications.

7. Print, repurpose and convert.

Produce high-quality contact sheets and prints of any size and layout. Enjoy easy WYSIWYG printing with annotations, grids, headers and footers. Perform single or batch conversions of images, movies and audio files to a variety of formats, including for use in Microsoft Silverlight experiences (Windows-only feature).

8. Present and share.

Publish and distribute media with cross-platform slide shows, video, and Web galleries, or quickly export media into multiple formats for delivery to your client. Use professionally designed templates, or modify them to suit your own style with customized timings, grids, transitions and even enhanced audio playback for background soundtracks. Effortlessly distribute your catalogs for viewing by anyone with the freely downloaded Expression Media Reader.

9. Archive and back up.

Archive and back up all your prized digital media files, folders and catalogs to CD, DVD or hard disk.

10. Automate tasks and workflow.

Nearly every feature can be batched, making your workflow efficient and cost-effective. The flexible, streamlined automation tools make organizing, editing, repurposing, distributing and archiving digital images nearly effortless. Expression Media also offers rich scripting capabilities as well as easy integration with third-party applications and tools.

Hands-on Exercises

About This Section

Accompanying this reviewers guide is a PDF of the printed Quick Start Guide that ships with Expression Media along with the two-hour Getting Started tutorial video. We realize that not all reviewers have time to complete full tutorials on the products they are reviewing, so as an alternative, we are providing simple hands-on exercises to enable you to get into the product features more quickly.

Ten exercises map to the top 10 features; however, the order is different from that of the list above to allow a better flow to the exercises. We encourage you to use the information contained within the Quick Start Guide to accompany these exercises.

1. Catalog media visually.

• Install and open Expression Media.

• Import items into an empty catalog.

o From a CD or DVD select File > Import Items > From Disk.

o From a digital camera select File > Import Items > From Camera.

o From a hard drive select files in a folder, and drag and drop into the catalog.

[pic]

2. Organize content quickly.

• Toggle the Info button in the toolbar at the top of the catalog window so that the Info panel is visible.

• Select an image in the catalog, and expand the Annotations panel to the left by clicking on the triangular arrow.

• Fill in the fields that are relevant to all the images in your catalog (e.g., Event, Location, Keywords).

• Click on the pencil icon at the top of the panel, and from the pull-down menu, select Save (Windows) or Save as Metadata Template (Macintosh). Now give your template a name.

[pic]

• Back in the main catalog window, click on another image, then go to Edit > Select All.

• Click on the pencil icon once again and select the template you created a moment ago. When prompted, click on Apply to all.

• Check your images by clicking on them individually to see that the annotations have been successfully applied. To apply annotations to several files at once, drag and drop groups of files onto annotations.

• Try selecting a few images either by SHIFT + CTRL and clicking on images or by typing a few letters into the search field in the top right of the catalog window.

3. Encode media for Silverlight.

You can easily import WMV, WMA, AVI, QuickTime and more into Expression Media Encoder (Windows-only feature), fine-tune your VC-1 settings, and choose your favorite Silverlight player template to output a Web-ready Silverlight experience. Please see the Expression Media Encoder Reviewers Guide for additional information.

4. Browse and play media in more than 100 formats.

• You can sort files by using file properties such as Capture Date and Path Name, or Annotations such as Event Date and Keywords. In the List view, right-click on the headers to view all available selections, or select the Sort button on the toolbar.

[pic]

• Click on the Thumbnail tab at the top of the catalog window, then go to Edit > Select All.

• Go to Action > Batch rename.

• New file names can be made up of three parts. Use the + or – to the right of the rename options so that two lines appear under Rename Options.

[pic]

• Change the drop-down menu to the left of the first line to Text. To the right of this, type in a name (for example, an event) that is appropriate for all the images in your catalog.

• Change the drop-down menu on the second line to Number from, and in the adjacent box type 1.

• The dialog box shows a preview of the changes to be made; click on the Rename button to confirm.

5. Review, compare, edit and enhance.

• Select between one and six images that you would like to view or compare.

• Choose View > Light Table to view selected images in full screen.

• Zoom in and out using the + and - keys.

• If the image is larger than the window, it will scroll by clicking and dragging. The Hot Key S toggles between scrolling one image or all images at the same time.

• Click on Esc to exit the Light Table.

• Now select an image in your catalog that you want to edit.

o Windows: Window > Image Editor

o Macintosh: Window > Show Image Editor

• Try out some of the options in the floating Image Editor palette, such as Auto Enhancement, Remove Red Eye, Adjust Color Balance and Sharpen Edges.

• Click on the Save button (this button will rename itself Batch if more than one image is selected) in the bottom of the palette to apply the changes, or Revert to try different effects.

6. Add and edit metadata.

• Select the image with the seal pups.

• On the Info pane, scroll down until you see the Keywords section. Double-click to enter the keywords Elephant Seal and South Georgia.

• You can also try adding a caption to your photo.

• Select all the images.

• Toggle to the Organize panel.

• Drag and drop all the images to the South Georgia keyword.

• These changes are saved to your Expression Media catalog file. To write the annotations to the files, select Action > Sync Annotations.

[pic]

7. Print, repurpose and convert.

• Import the images in the RAW folder by selecting File > Import Items > From Files/Folders.

• Select the RAW images, and then select Action > Convert Image Files. (If no items are selected, this will convert all image files in the catalog.)

• Ensure that JPEG is selected from the drop-down Format menu. Click on the Size button. Click on the Scale media to fit radio button, and type in a pixel width that is half the existing size. Click on OK.

• Now click on the Settings button, and choose Grayscale from the drop-down menu. Click on OK.

• Uncheck both Options boxes in the Convert Image Files dialog box, and click on Convert. Create a new folder called Test2, and click on OK (Windows) or Choose (Macintosh).

[pic]

• Now open up a couple of the images you’ve created in a Web browser to check that the batch matches your requirements.

• To print a contact sheet, click on the printer icon in the main toolbar at the top of the catalog window.

• Select Contact Sheet and Full Page (Windows) or Media Sheet (Macintosh) from the pull-down menus.

• Click on Print.

8. Present and share.

• Select the first image in your catalog.

• Click on the slide show icon at the right of the toolbar to start the slide show.

• Show and hide the slide show controller with the Return key.

• Try changing the Transitions, altering the Grid, displaying Title and varying the Options in the floating slide show palette.

[pic]

• You can also save your slide show as a QuickTime movie, so you can distribute a catalog of images as a movie (with transitions and timing) without the Expression Media application. Just choose Make > Save Slide Show as Movie.

• Select Make > HTML Gallery.

• Choose a theme, give your photo gallery a title, and ensure that the Launch browser when done box is checked. Click on the Create (Windows) or Make (Macintosh) button.

• Create a new folder called Test, and select this as the upload folder.

• Click on the OK (Windows) or Choose (Macintosh) button. Your Web browser should now reveal what your photo gallery would look like if hosted online.

9. Archive and back up.

• Select the files you want to archive or back up to CD.

• Select Make > Backup/CD-ROM.

• Select the location you would like to back up to. If you would like to back up to CD or DVD, enter the media in your drive now.

• The Only visible media files option will back up just the files in active view instead of all the files in the catalog.

• The Reset paths option will reset the paths of items in the open catalog to the location of the media files that have been backed up. For example, if you backed up a group of files to a CD-ROM, the catalog would reset paths of those items to the media on the CD-ROM.

[pic]

10. Automate tasks and workflow.

Nearly every feature of Expression Media can be scripted to make completing digital asset management tasks easy. For further detail on automating tasks and workflow, see the National Geographic Workflow Solution article regarding iView MediaPro, the predecessor to Expression Media. ()

It is hoped that these short exercises have helped introduce you to the many and varied design options within Expression Media. Only some of the features have been touched on, and you are encouraged to continue to explore the program.

System Requirements

The following hardware and software are required for Expression Media:

PC

• 1GHz or faster processor

• 1 GB of RAM or more

• 1024 x 768 display with 24-bit color

• 100 MB of hard disk space for installation

• Microsoft Windows XP (XP SP2) with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista

• Apple QuickTime 7.1.5 or later

• DirectX® 9.0c

• Adobe Reader 7.0 or higher for PDF file support

Apple Macintosh

• Macintosh OS X version 10.4 or later

• PowerPC or Intel processor

• 512 MB of RAM or more

• 100 MB of available hard disk space

• DVD-ROM drive

• Monitor set to millions of colors

• Apple QuickTime 7.1.5 or later

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