Many of Expression Media 2's most impressive improvements are way under the covers. Today I'd like to talk about file import - or more correctly, file ingestion. The improvements here are in two areas - reliability and performance.

Let's talk about performance first. iView and Expression Media have traditionally been for use on a stand-alone machine with one user. When people started putting media files on servers and importing across the network, they found that performance, well, stunk. Expression Media 2 improves performance, particularly across networks, dramatically. What used to take 5 minutes to ingest, may realistically take 2 minutes under Expression Media2.

Secondly, reliability. Under Expression Media 1, the file import process would crash the application if importing a single file failed. Sometimes that failure actually occurred in QuickTime, which Expression Media used to render the thumbnails. In those cases, Expression Media would fail silently. The application "went away" without showing you an error. You simply lost your unsaved catalog changes.

With Expression Media 2, we have completely rewritten the file import process.

• If ingesting one file fails, the app does not crash. It simply logs the failure and picks up again on the next file.
• Import is broken into multiple code threads - so that we can work on ingesting multiple files at the same time. We might be importing metadata on one file, and building thumbnails on 2 others simultaneously.

For you, this means a much more reliable, useable application. True, it doesn't look much different on the outside, but it's very much changed on the inside.