David Sayed's Microsoft Blog : microsoft expression

Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards

dsayed — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:58:41 GMT

We’ve been nominated in three categories for the 2009 Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards. There are 22 categories in all and run the gamut from content to technologies. You can enter your votes here. We’ve been nominated in the following categories:

Voting closes on October 16th and the winners will be announced at Streaming Media West in San Jose on November 18th, so if you feel inclined to vote please do so soon.

Obviously, I’m not asking you to vote specifically for us, but if you don’t know about the awards then you can’t vote so I thought I’d at least let everyone know and hope for the best :)

Demonstration von Expression Media in Deutsch

dsayed — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:01:10 GMT

At Photokina, we were lucky enough to have a local Expression Media fan who spent pretty much the entire week of his own time demoing Expression Media at our booth. Wolfgang works for Microsoft in Germany, but does not actually work on the product itself! Below is a snippet of him demoing Expression Media in German. I wish the video were longer, but unfortunately trade show internet connectivity being what it is, we lost it at the critical moment of demoing Virtual Earth integration.

(note that I wasn’t dumb enough to leave the German translation of the title to an automated translation service, or I would have ended up with Demonstration der Meinungsfreiheit Medien in Deutsch…)

Office 2008 for Mac at Photokina

dsayed — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:25:17 GMT

I spent some time with the Mac Office guys at Photokina who were showing the Special Media Edition version of the product, which includes Expression Media. Below is a video that shows Mac users some of the cool things they can do when they use Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition to manage and create documents.

Be sure to check out the split screen action as Mike shows how you can easily compose documents by dragging and dropping visual and content assets from Expression Media into Word and PowerPoint!

Expression Media 2 Service Pack 1 is here

dsayed — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:03:00 GMT

Expression Media 2 SP1 is now available. If you are a Windows user and have opted to receive updates for other applications besides Windows, you should be offered the download next time Windows Update runs. If you wish to download the update manually, you may do so here.

The Mac version is available for download here and ~~will become~~ is now available through Microsoft AutoUpdate that is installed with Expression Media 2 or with Microsoft Office on the Mac.

The release notes telling you what’s new are below, but if you’re an Expression Media 2 user, I would highly recommend this release.

Overview

Expression Media 2 SP1 provides the latest updates to Microsoft Expression Media Version 2. Expression Media 2 SP1 has taken the customer feedback from the Expression Media 2 release and the goal of driving both stability and quality to a new level.
To achieve this goal the team fixed over 400 bugs in SP1 and added the following improvements to the Expression Media 2 product by feature:

Hierarchical Keywords

Child nodes are removed automatically when the parent node is removed.
The interaction between hierarchical keywords and flat list keywords is improved.
The drag behavior between a parent node and a child node is improved.

Geo-tagging/Virtual Earth

Drag-and-drop capabilities have been added to the Virtual Earth window.
Keywords display when you drag an image to a Virtual Earth window.
The GPS annotation field is now user editable.
GPS locations can be sniffed from URLs with embedded Lat/Long info.
More latitude and longitude formats have been added.
Latitude and longitude tags can be added for display in HTML galleries.

Raw Image support

You can now catalog and manage media that is shared on a network by using Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV).

Info Panel

The template event data can be saved correctly.
Author details can be displayed correctly.
The annotated date can be displayed correctly when you import .nef files.

Catalog Editing

Long paths and long file names are supported when paths are reset.
Unexpected duplicates are no longer created.
Expression Media now remembers the last used open location.
Catalog finder shows the full paths of image files.

Import

Large files, such as 16000x8000 images, are now supported in HTML galleries.
Rendering performance for the Nikon .nef files is improved.
.arw files display the Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) data.
Issues related to imports from camera disks are fixed.

Light Table

Multi-item drawing issues are fixed.
The behavior of the delete button has changed.
The position of the magnifier pointer is fixed.
Keyboard shortcut issues are resolved.
The user experience when switching between full-screen and windowed mode is improved.

In application help

More than 50 updates to help contents.

Action Log and Error reporting

More useful feedback has been added when some tasks cannot be completed.

Date Finder

The Date Finder in the Organize panel now enables navigation by month, year, and day.

Reading Annotations on Import

An intermittent problem in which only some imported files had the correct Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) annotations is fixed.

Long file names and file names with extended characters

Several problems with Unicode and truncated file names have been fixed. For example, issues with displaying or resolving those file names have been fixed.

File Info Panel for Adobe Applications

The Windows version now installs the Expression Media File Info Panel for use with Adobe applications, including Photoshop

Exchangeable Image File (EXIF)

Several problems that occur when you import or export EXIF metadata are fixed. For example, when you import Canon or Sony raw images, incorrect EXIF information may be generated.

Color Profiles

A problem in which some color profiles may be reported incorrectly is fixed. For example, the color matching of Nikon .nef images in some circumstances is improved.

Export to Movie Maker

Export to Movie Maker is now supported regardless of whether Quicktime is installed. Removed option to password protect a catalog

Catalog Passwords

Earlier versions of Expression Media and iView MediaPro included the password option to protect a catalog. This option was removed to encourage users to use a more secure method for protecting personal information. For more information, see the Expression Media Help.

Setting up at Photokina

dsayed — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:41:02 GMT

Some of you know what goes into making a trade show happen. For those who don't, the day before the show opens can be crazy: making sure that everything works while the booth is getting built around you. Here are some behind the scenes photos.

Photokina

dsayed — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:35:17 GMT

This week, I'm at Photokina with a large number of Microsoft people. If you're around, come and see us in Hall 0.41 Stand H049 G031.

We have lots of interesting things being shown including Expression Media 2 Service Pack 1, Photosynth, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, Office 2008 Special Media Edition and Capture One by Phase One. There are continuous theatre presentations in both German and English and Peter Krogh of The DAM Book fame will be presenting integrated workflow with Capture One and Expression Media. Miss Aniela aka Natalie Dybisz is also on hand and will be talking about her workflow and production techniques.

iView/Expression Media London Meet-up

dsayed — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:11:22 GMT

Some of the Expression Media team will be in the UK the week of September 15th just before Photokina. I’ll be there to attend REMIX 08 in Brighton and am thinking about organising an informal meet up for iView and Expression Media users.

If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll set one up. So in order to gauge interest, possible dates and a venue, please complete the survey here.

Unfortunately, I didn't receive enough responses to make this worthwhile. Fpr those of you who were interested, sorry!

Thanks!

Expression Media is Going to Photokina

dsayed — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:28:36 GMT

Expression Media will be represented at Photokina in Cologne, Germany from September 23rd to 28th. We’ll be there together with the Rich Media Group. If you’re attending, stop by Hall 04.1 Stand H049 G031 and say hello.

Also, let me know if you have any interest in having a user meeting at the event. If enough people are interested, I can look at setting something up.

Tchüss!

Expression Studio 2 Keys

dsayed — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:44:40 GMT

There have been some questions in the Expression forums about product keys and apparent confusion as to which keys work with which products. The product keys are located behind the installation media (DVDs) in the Expression Studio box. This is what they look like:

Most of Expression Studio 2 uses a single product key to unlock it. The exception is Expression Web 2, which has its own product key. Expression Media 2 has two product keys: one for Windows and one for Mac. Using the Mac one on Windows will not work, and vice versa. The fourth product key in the sequence above is for Visual Studio Standard 2008, which is included with Expression Studio 2.

If you have a standalone (non Studio) version of Expression Media 2, you will find two product keys in the box: one for Mac, one for Windows.

I hope this clears up any confusion.

Expression Encoder Customer Panel

dsayed — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:43:02 GMT

Now that Expression Encoder 2 has been released, the team is hard at work on the next version of the product.
We want to be as responsive to community feedback as possible, and would like to set up a panel of customers with whom we can have ongoing conversations.

What is the Customer Panel?

The Customer Panel is a way for us to build strong relationships with users of our product. We'll use it as a way to understand your needs, workflows as well as how you use the product. We'll also use it to float future feature ideas and get feedback on them

What is the time requirement?

The Customer Panel is an ongoing project. The overall impact should be minimal and if at any point you no longer want to participate, just tell us. Typically we'll aim to reach out the Panel every couple of months or so. There may some times when we reach out more frequently.

How is this different to a Technology Adoption Program (TAP)?

TAPs are for specific releases and focus on getting you pre-releases of the software to play with. We'll use the same framework for the Customer Panel, but it is longer lived and goes beyond a particular release. This is an opportunity to have lasting impact on product direction.

OK sign me up!

If you want to take part, please send me an email by clicking here.

The Secret Compressionist's Ball

dsayed — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:26:25 GMT

OK, so it wasn't secret and it wasn't a ball either but I couldn't resist the reference. Ben Waggoner hosted a party for video compressionists at NAB this year and I dragged myself there. I was feeling worse for wear not because of over-indulgences in Vegas, but rather the effects of a nasty 76 hour bug I came down with while on the way to Vegas. Coming off 5 hours of booth duty didn't help either. So... not as many videos as I'd like to have had, but we've got a couple of nice little interviews.

Promoscape

First is Tony Houghton from Promoscape in Port Melbourne, Australia. They have over 25 years of experience in the television and video industry and produce DVDs, on-air network promos, programming and pay-per-view DRM downloads.

MainConcept

Next up is Bruce Lidl from MainConcept based in Aachen, Germany. Bruce, however, prefers the sunnier climate of San Diego, California. MainConcept provides codecs for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, VC-1 and many others. They provide VC-1 codecs that work across different platforms.

If you want to be in the know about more of Ben's get togethers, please check out the wmtalk mailing list.

Free Expression!

dsayed — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:10:18 GMT

Did you know that students can get Expression products for free? As part of Microsoft's family of developer tools, all Expression products are available at no charge to eligible students through DreamSpark. For more information on DreamSpark together with information on how to download the products, please visit the DreamSpark site on Channel 8.

Microsoft NAB Booth Video

dsayed — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:31:00 GMT

Here's some video I shot around the Microsoft booth at NAB, focusing on Expression Encoder. You'll see Brandon, one of our very own Encoder program managers, in the middle of some exceptional demoing.

The video is of course hosted using the Silverlight Streaming Service and was encoded using Expression Encoder 2. The video was shot on a Canon HG-10 AVCHD camcorder, which records to hard drive. More on the editing process later.

Expression Encoder at NAB

dsayed — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:22:31 GMT

We had a Microsoft Expression pod at the Microsoft booth and spent most of the time talking about Expression Encoder 2. This was the first opportunity for many people to actually see the new version of Expression Encoder and in some cases, the first time for them to see Expression Encoder at all! All the Microsoft folks who were there did a sterling job over the many hours that they were there doing demos, talking to customers, solving problems and generally spreading the word about the products.

We did end-to-end demos of Encoder - what the workflow looks like from ingesting a video to the finished result of Silverlight video uploaded to the Silverlight Live Streaming service - as well as feature deep dives. One particularly popular feature is live encoding, where you essentially have a studio switcher on your computer, enabling you to stream a programme and switch between various live and pre-recorded sources (see screen capture below).

Personally, I find these events great for two reasons:

I get to see how people respond to who we think we should be talking about the product.
I gain insights from real people about how they use products in the real world. There's nothing like a customer telling you to your face that you made a dumb decision by not doing XYZ to make it real.

Expression Encoder MIX08 Sessions

dsayed — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:40:42 GMT

I was at MIX08 in Las Vegas last week and wanted to let everyone know that the sessions are now posted on visitmix.com. For a great overview of Expression Encoder 2, look no further than the Expression Encoder session presented by James Clarke and Charles Finkelstein - and prepare to be amazed by the depth and breadth of functionality in the product!

For a fantastic and must see session on how to make your videos look great, check out compressionist extraordinaire Ben Waggoner's Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight Delivery Scenarios. While Expression Encoder 2 makes it a point and click process to produce Silverlight video, knowing a bit about what's going on and which parameters to optimise can pay huge dividends.