VERDICT: Bizarrely antiquated and underpowered creative asset management.

To give a general boost to its professional design credentials and in particular to its Expression Studio suite, Microsoft decided that it needed an application for managing media assets and so bought up iView MediaPro 3...

And, apart from the bundling of the new Expression Media Encoder (see below), that’s pretty much what Microsoft has released as the new Expression Media. This is a major disappointment as the iView environment sticks out from the other Expression apps like a sore thumb. More importantly, it looks ugly, dated and amateurish with the lack of smoothly resizable thumbnails and the shareware-style file listing particularly jarring. These aren’t just cosmetic criticisms – the success of a visual management application largely depends on its interface.
In terms of power, Expression Media supports over 100 file formats including the usual suspects and some extras such as PDF and various camera RAW formats. However to create the asset thumbnails you first have to import the relevant directories into catalogs. This does mean that you can log removable media such as CD-ROMs, and you can at least set up folder watching, but the need to manually setup multiple catalogs rather than an immediately explorable, single Tree view of all the assets on your hard disk is hugely limiting and way past its sell-by-date.
Once you’ve selected your creative asset, you can preview it in its own window (including video files) and most of the usual options are there: image rotation, basic rating, keyword tagging, batch renaming and conversion to other supported formats. You can also drag-and-drop supported files into Expression Design and Media Encoder though, disappointingly, not into the central Expression Blend. More advanced options include the ability to output thumbnails as web galleries, to create slideshows which can be saved as QuickTime videos and to create layouts that can be saved to PDF – though in each case the level of control is pretty basic.
More to the point, in each case the creation process is awkward and uninviting.
Again it comes back to the interface – if ever a program was crying out for an Expression Blend-based makeover, Expression Media is it. As it stands, no-one should be interested in the exorbitant standalone version of Expression Media and - Expression Media Encoder aside - few Studio users will get much benefit from the bundled version.

EASE OF USE 2/6
FEATURES 3/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 2/6
OVERALL 2/6

Microsoft Expression Media Encoder

VERDICT: Modern and efficient conversion to WMV with ahead-of-the-curve Silverlight capabilities.

Expression Media is largely unchanged from the iView MediaPro 3 application that Microsoft acquired as its media asset management platform, but it does include one important new feature: a bundled version of Expression Media Encoder.
Expression Media Encoder is a brand-new, standalone application designed to prepare video for your design projects and to ensure that the resulting files provide the best possible mix of onscreen quality and file size efficiency. As such, Expression Media Encoder fulfils the same role as Adobe’s Flash Video Encoder outputting to WMV format rather than FLV. However Media Encoder is considerably more polished than its rival, sharing the same look-and-feel, usability and efficiency, as the core Expression components. It also puts Expression Media to shame.
Most importantly, Expression Media Encoder is simple – in basic operation you just import your video files into the queue, set In and Out points in the preview, choose output profiles to set size and desired bitrate and then hit Encode. That’s the basics but there’s plenty more power available including the ability to add markers, script-based triggers, leaders, trailers, metadata, thumbnails and bitmap overlays and the ability to compare the quality of different profiles and settings side-by-side.
Most impressive is the option to choose an output template which automatically wraps the resulting WMV file in one of a range of attractive player skins and provides all the necessary HTML, XAML and JavaScript files necessary to enable cross-platform playback in the browser. Microsoft even offers a generous 4GB of free streaming video hosting.
However there is a catch – this browser-based display of WMV files depends on Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology which is based on a subset of XAML and .NET with added JavaScript functionality. The problem is that the other Expression Studio apps, and in particular Blend and Web, aren’t yet geared up for Silverlight. More to the point, neither are your likely end users as Microsoft has only just released the beta of the all-important, cross-platform, cross-browser Silverlight player.
Media Encoder’s Silverlight support will undoubtedly play an important role in future releases of Expression Studio – but for the moment it’s as ahead of its time as Expression Media is behind.

Free with Expression Media (and Expression Studio)

EASE OF USE 5/6
FEATURES 5/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 5/6
OVERALL 5/6