Toast 10 Titanium now comes in two flavors: standard and Pro. The standard version includes all the great digital media features and extra goodies you're used to, like CD SpinDoctor, Disc Cover, Streamer and Get Backup. It's the perfect complement to iLife, helping you get more out of your digital media. But Toast 10 Pro takes your media to a whole new level, with five pro-quality apps worth more than $300:
- High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-in for burning and converting video from your HD camcorder;
- LightZone™ for visual photo editing;
- FotoMagico™ for creating high-definition slideshows;
- SoundSoap™ SE for audio noise reduction and enhancement; and the
- Sonicfire Pro® for movie soundtrack creation;
Read on to learn more about each of these programs.
High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-In
The High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-in, which lets you edit, burn and convert HD video content from AVCHD camcorders and EyeTV recordings, is an extra cost option in Toast 10, but comes standard with Toast 10 Pro. With the Plug-in, you can burn your home movies or EyeTV recordings onto DVDs and Blu-ray Discs for playback on any standard Blu-ray set-top box or PlayStation® 3 game console. You don't even need a pricey Blu-ray recorder to burn high-definition DVDs, so you can get the full benefit of your high-def camcorder and HDTV with the DVD burner you already have.
If you do have a Blu-ray recorder, the High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-in is indispensable for creating Blu-ray movie discs on the Mac. It supports both AVCHD and HDV camcorder sources, and lets you archive AVCHD camcorder video to disc in one easy step.
The Plug-in also allows you to edit your high-def videos, and crop out unwanted portions using a simple timeline interface. You can burn the results to disc using 20 new HD menu themes, or convert them for playback on your iPod, iPhone, Apple TV or portable player. Take your EyeTV shows and home movies on the road!
Editing high-def AVCHD video in Toast 10 (click to enlarge).
LightZone
This Macworld Editor's Choice award-winning photo editor is an essential tool for digital camera enthusiasts. Sophisticated features like zone mapping and relight yield professional quality light and color balance, and all operations are live -- no waiting for effects to render, as with other programs. What you see is what you get. All operations are non-destructive, too, so you'll never have to worry about your original files. LightZone is the perfect complement to Aperture and iPhoto, which have only basic editing tools.
Here are a few of the things you can do with LightZone:
- Edit RAW format images, to take advantage of today's high-end cameras;
- Perform advanced selection and masking, so you can apply filters and effects to just the right portion of your photo;
- Work with unlimited layers, for unlimited creativity;
- Perform batch processing tasks on multiple files and folders at once, for huge time savings; and
The LightZone editor showing the Relight and Spot tools (click to enlarge).
FotoMagico
The slideshow features in iPhoto are great, but when you want more control over things like transitions, music and special effects, it's time to take a step up to FotoMagico. FotoMagico turns your pictures into spellbinding stories and presents them in high definition -- taking full advantage of all those megapixels in your new digital camera. Innovative text, transition and alignment tools ensure astonishing results. With Toast 10 Pro, you can also burn your high-def slideshow to DVD or Blu-ray Disc for easy viewing, send them to your portable player, or convert them for emailing or publishing on your website.
Creating a high-def slideshow with FotoMagico (click to enlarge).
SoundSoap SE
Want your sound recordings and LP transfers to sound as good as the originals? Use SoundSoap SE to remove all types of unwanted sounds from digital audio files: hiss, room noise, rumble, electrical hum, clicks and crackles. You can clean up music you've digitized from your aging vinyl and tapes with CD SpinDoctor's Recording Assistant. Or massage the audio tracks from your videos, eliminating wind and background noise to make your dialog loud and clear. Virtually any type of background noise can be scrubbed out quickly and easily with SoundSoap, leaving you with clean, crisp audio that sounds like you remember it.
Cleaning up noise from analog recordings with SoundSoap SE.
Even better, SoundSoap SE is very simple to use, just bring in your recording, then tweak your audio using the buttons and sliders. You can preview the results both sonically and visually, making it easy to get great results.
Sonicfire Pro
Want to set the right mood for your home videos? Create a Hollywood-style soundtrack with Sonicfire Pro. Music and sound effects can turn a ho-hum video into a riveting thriller or an uplifting story, but few of us have the ability to record our own backing tracks. That's where Sonicfire comes in.
For example, using Sonicfire, you could create a soundtrack for a wedding highlight video that includes selected dialog like the wedding vows and reception toasts, as well as a unified background music theme, where otherwise there would be no continuity (not to mention poor recording quality).
Creating a wedding video soundtrack with Sonicfire Pro (click to enlarge).
You can tweak Sonicfire tracks to match the length, mood, and theme of your video. A huge library of professionally produced music in styles ranging from classical to hip-hop ensure you can create the perfect soundtrack without knowing how to read a note.