Pros & Cons
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- Affordable.
- Free, lifetime backup of images at 1,600-by-1,200 dpi.
- Good scrapbook templates.
- Accessible DVD production.
- Very easy to use.
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- Editing interface and feature set are limited.
- Corel branding is intrusive.
Corel MediaOne Plus Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Tech Support: | 8:00 AM CST - 5:00 PM CST |
| Type: | Personal |
Many digital photographers are one hard drive crash away from losing their entire collections. Corel MediaOne Plus (née
With the simple, logical interface, form follows function. In a vertical tool panel on the left, you access sets of activities using four stacked buttons. Selecting the Home button lets you collect, organize, and distribute images and videos. Clicking on Enhance, lets you edit them. To develop multimedia presentations with images and videos, you choose Show, and to produce different styles of printed output, you select Create.
Click on a button and a list of activities you can perform appears below it. To the right, in the main window, a panel specific to that task category appears. For example, choosing Enhance causes Share, Adjust Photo, Apply Effects, and Add Text to appear under the button and also brings up the currently selected image in an editing panel in the main window. Tabs at the top of the main window let you quickly switch between the four activity panels, which correspond to the four buttons.
Somewhat confusingly, though, only two of the tabs—Show and Project—have the same names as their tool-panel buttons. The tab associated with the Home panel is labeled with the name of the currently opened folder (such as My Pictures). What should be the Enhance tab has the name of the currently selected image—flowers.jpg, for instance.—
Getting Organized
Choosing the Organize task under the Home button produces a display somewhat like the Windows Explorer tree. MediaOne imports the images automatically from your My Pictures folder, and the panel in the main window will show thumbnails of the images. You can add other images and videos by clicking an Organize folder labeled Browse More Folders and navigating to the appropriate directory. Finally, you can input images directly from your camera, which worked well when I tried it with a Norcent DCS-760.
The feature for collecting and managing images works well, but it lacks fun views like Picasa's full-screen Timeline or Photoshop Element's geographical view. There is a calendar view, however, which ties images to creation dates, making it easy for you tofind those pictures from Halloween or your child's last birthday. A convenient Zoom slider lets you quickly and smoothly adjust all thumbnails in the panel, and another tool lets you add simple tags you can later use in searches. Below the main window there's a Photo Tray you can drag images to for later use—say, in a slide show or calendar.
The most significant new feature comes from an arrangement with Sharpcast that lets you back up all your images online, at no cost, for life. To start, you designate which folders to back up in a program window. Thereafter, whenever you add additional images to any of those folders, MediaOne uploads the image automatically. The service stores all images at full resolution for 30 days, then resizes them to 1,600 by 1,200 dpi. Users who want to maintain pictures at full resolution have to pay a subscription fee. If you don't want to pay for full-size storage, the software also helps you easily back up collections to CD or DVD media, another valuable option.—
Bringing Out the Best
If you double-click on a thumbnail in the Home panel, the image appears in the Enhance panel, where you can make a series of simple adjustments and apply effects. Both the corrective tools and the interface are mixed bags, though. You get the usual suspects—Quick Fix (for exposure and white balance), red-eye reduction, and cropping—with nice extras like the Makeover tool, a surprisingly effective tooth whitener and blemish remover. Other effects let you convert to black and white and sepia, apply Picture Tubes (clip art), and add picture frames, which I found the most useful of the three.
But you'll find no tools like
Put on a Show, Build a Project, and Share
MediaOne makes it easy to create manually or automatically operated presentations that mix images and videos and have transitions, pan-and-zoom effects, and background audio. To add content to a show, you just drag the desired image or video into the Storyboard from the Photo Tray, choose a background audio track, and decide which effects to include (if any). MediaOne can synchronize slide duration to the music track—a nice touch.
video, MediaOne works best with content downloaded from a still camera, since the software can't capture video from a DV or HDV camcorder. Video editing is primitive; you can trim frames from the beginning or ending of a clip and grab a still frame from the video, but that's pretty much it. Still, if you're simply transferring clips from your digital still camera to DVD, that's probably enough.
Once you've got your show assembled, you can preview it, then save it as a Windows Media file. The software gives you good video-resolution options, including 320-by-240 for the Web, and up to 1,920-by-1,080 for high-definition viewing. After you render your first movie, on the bottom right you'll notice MediaOne's logo, but you can hide it via a checkbox in the Preferences panel.
When you've finished editing and producing your shows, you can use the CVS or Webshots online services to print your images, send the shows (or pictures) via e-mail, or burn them to a DVD. The rudimentary DVD-authoring feature lacks basics, such as the ability to preview what you're going to burn, but it's very easy to use. You can add multiple shows to a DVD, with each accessible to viewers via a single menu button. All canned menus include Corel MediaOne logos, and you can't easily substitute your own backgrounds—a problem if you don't want all your productions to contain Corel advertising.
You can, of course, print locally. Clicking on the Create button brings you to the MediaOne Projects, which I enjoyed. I liked the Print Layout selection, where you choose from a number of configurations and can easily produce pictures in standard sizes, like 4-by-6 and 5-by-7—a hassle with many other programs. For other projects, you can build multipage scrapbooks (using templates from Smilebox and from Sandra Magsamen), greeting cards, calendars, certificates, and more.
You can try Corel MediaOne Plus free for 30 days. After that, the software reverts to a no-cost version called MediaOne Starter, which lacks most of the higher-end editing and ouput features. You retain the free lifetime Sharpcast backup service, though. I find the logo that appears on DVD menus annoying, and the product has only limited capabilities, but it's powerful enough for beginners and casual users, and priced accordingly. And the free photo backup for life (even at limited resolutions) makes it all the more worthwhile.
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Final Thoughts
Corel MediaOne Plus
This reasonably priced software lets you easily create and share basic projects like albums, calendars, scrapbooks, and slide shows that include audio and video— even throwing in free, lifetime online image backup—but you won't be pushing the multimedia envelope.