Free Product Giveaway: Microsoft Expression Studio

Thanks to the generous folks over at Microsoft, they have provided me with nine copies of Expression Studio that I can give away on the blog. The Expression Studio bundle includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Media and Expression Design and retails for $599. Expression Studio also includes a license for Expression Encoder and anyone can currently download a 180 day trail of the encoder here.

This drawing is now over. Dustin Reyes, Brett Stime and Jeff Parr won the drawing.

I will be giving these away in batches of three at a time and would like to give them away to those who will really use them as part of their daily job. To qualify to win a copy you must leave one comment in this post with a suggestion for Microsoft on how they can improve any aspect of Expression, Silverlight or Windows Media. Have you seen a feature you'd like included? Is there something missing that you think should be in the next version? Leave a comment with a working e-mail address. I will pick three users a week from today using a random number picker website and ship them out to the winners at no cost.

If any company is interested in getting exposure for their video related product on my blog and is willing to give away the product, contact me. I will post pictures of the product, link to the company website and potentially write a product review or link to other reviews on the web. It's great exposure on a blog that does over 300,000 page views a month.

Comments

[rich]

I'd like WMP to work more like QT Player: single frame advance, arrow for etc. If they offered features that used to be free from Apple, simple things really copy, paste, trim with save without recompress, plus exports -- weel they'd be able to make millions happy who just learned how to do this with text.

And of coursee, work with FLV, or even everything like Real. One-stop shopping.

[John]

Don't own Expression (yet), so I have no experience, but I'm wondering about DRM policies and options. Historically these have been issues with Media Player

[dunn]

Honestly my biggest problem with Windows Media are all of the compatibility issues. Sure, when set up with the "ideal" configuration I can do some amazing things for clients, but most people don't have perfect setups at home. It feels like a constant battle to ensure my media content will work perfectly for visitors when using many of the Microsoft technologies, which often overrides any of the advantages their amazing work can provide.

[Jeff Parr]

I am not real familiar with Expression Studio, but am a little with Silverlight. I think Microsoft should work on compatibility issues with their users, especially with Live streams. At least in my experience (very little so far) many people cannot view a live Windows Media stream on a "Work" computer, even when their IT department told them it was a Go. Hopefully Silverlight will be able to resolve some of those issues!

[Ed]

I too would like Expression to work with Video and Streaming tech as means of Output Delivery.

[Keith Garbinski]

Silverlight needs to be able to recognize more codecs so it can transcode more encoded videos and not force some one to transcode a video (and in doing so adding artifact) so that it can then again transcode the video to WMV. This is also true for the media player give it the ability to recognize more codecs so don't get the message can't download codec or video is unrecognizable. At my previous job at "C1N" we did alot of transcoding and trying to find the best parameters to get the best encoded video with the least artifacts was hell with so many diffrent encoded videos needing transcoding.

[Ronaldo Thompson]

Product: ease of use.... it’s all about help!

To enable/assist the use of the various tools, process & features - extend the control-tips with a short demo; rich content video 'how-to-do' type examples. This would help in areas where skill set are gray/poor in a product that cuts across the complete web development.

It can be very frustrating when you only need a reminder to help you and you then rely on a predominately text based help system. I find it is always easier to get someone to show you how to do it and this will address this requirement. Maybe even allowing you to make your own help video examples and link them to a control-tip would be worth pursuing.

[Mike Benson]

I am just beginning to learn the possibilities of using Silverlight. I have not used an ASP.NET backend on past projects, and I don't plan to in the near future. I know that other backend server technologies are supported, but most of the tutorials use ASP.NET. I would like to have access to either screencasts or tutorials for using it with JSON and any other server side technologies Microsoft deems worthy.

[R Green]

The content owner needs to be able to swap the DRM profile without totally re-encoding the media asset. not sure with Expression Studio but with Windows Media Encoder some content owners have spent 7 figures + encoding their content and if using a windows DRM workflow, they might be tied to an outside licensing service. if that service goes under, or an alternative pops up, they need to re-encode from scratch. rg

[ed sharpe]

we would love a copy of the encoder for www.glendaledailyplanet.com community news run with scrounged stuff.

It looks like everyone covered codecs and coming in this late I would have to state yea yea yea... but also I would like to see in the encoder a little more automated namer of generating profiles and templates for system parameters.

I would like to See a help site and /or help files with more application examples and ideas.

We are using the old WM encoder and the expressions trial ran out on the demo version... so I guess I am pleading a case of need

thanks ed sharpe
Glendale Daily Planet / KKAT Internet TV

[ed sharpe]

Expression encoder offers great features just having graphical user interfaces to configure everything up would be welcomed... We need it.. it is the future for us. and we would make great use of course of the rest of expression studio... as the poor old www.glendaledailyplanet.com is a creation of frontpage 2000.....

[Ian]

As a student in South Africa, I would like to see more countries' schools and universities on their website, currently, South Africa is not even on the list...

It is a great idea, but I think everyone needs access to it.

[FLV Player]

Thank you for posted this great article!