Lately I have been involved in a couple of projects that have kept me busy and not given me much time to work with Silverlight and WPF so I haven’t been keeping up on the progress of the Expression 3 products release. Yesterday I was browsing my MSDN subscription for a download and noticed that Expression Studio 3 RTM was on the site for download. What was even more interesting was that the full studio was available under my VS 2008 Professional MSDN subscription. Previously only Expression Blend and Expression Web were available. So, I immediately started the 252 MB download to check it out.
I haven’t had the opportunity to go through the whole Studio but one of the cool things I noticed right away is the new Expression Encoder 3 Screen Capture application.
Most of us have used screen capture tools and this particular application is very similar to others. It can capture the standard screen and mouse movements as well as web cam video and audio. What is unique is that you can then take the captured footage and directly import it into Expression Encoder with a single click. From inside Encoder you can then encode the video into a number of previously supported formats such as WMV, or into new formats such as H.264 including both Standard Def. and High Def. qualities. It also has preset encoding options that allow you to target: Silverlight (IIS Smooth Streaming, etc.), devices (Windows Mobile, Zune, Zune HD, XBOX 360, iPhone, etc.), and online services (YouTube HD/SD, Facebook, Vimeo HD). This is a cool little application and compliments the full Encoder 3 application very well.
Tags: expression, encoder 3