Using a digital camera saves money on film and photo development, but you also end up with reams of image files on your computer. For this, Micro Research's 3D-Album DVD Suite 2.03 provides a viable means to organize computer-based photos into virtual PC-based photo albums and save these photo albums as video files that may be burned onto CDs and DVDs. These CDs and DVDs, in turn, may be viewed on DVD-equipped televisions.
3D-Album DVD Suite 2.03 is identical to its sister product, 3-D Album, but comes with an additional program that converts albums into video files.
software - 3D Album DVD Suite 2.03
To start, 3D-Album offers simple tools for viewing and organizing photo images that are stored on your computer. You simply drag and drop image thumbnails within folders to change their presentation order, and then select a style for the 3D album. The program then builds a colorful and visually impressive slide-show. It doesn't get any easier than this.
3D-Album provides over 70 3D styles. Some are fairly straight-forward - walking down hallways that display pictures, floating balloons, scrolling frames and more. And some are downright distracting with spinning boxes and such.
Each presentation style has a number of settings that you may adjust that includes the animation speed; photo size; background color, material, texture and headline text. In addition to the 23 built-in styles, Micro Research offers more styles that may be downloaded for free from its website. An Album Mixer feature lets you create a composite 3D-Album presentation with multiple presentation styles and transitions.
The program covers the multimedia bases. You may insert your own personal text and voice narrations for each photo as well as select background sounds and music by linking MP3, WMA, WAVE, or MIDI files. 3D-Album creates stand-alone desktop programs, screensavers, HTML pages, ZIP files, and self-expandable EXE files. The EXE files are useful for sharing albums with others on CD.
The DVD Suite version comes with a utility that converts albums into video files. The program supports AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, Windows Media and RealVideo formats. We found the conversions to be adequate, and to actually burn the video files onto a CD or DVD, you'll need separate CD/DVD software. It would have been nice if the software could burn video files directly onto a disc.
If you already own Microsoft PowerPoint, you may be unimpressed with 3-D Album. PowerPoint lacks 3-D Album's flashy virtual albums and ease of use, and it costs a lot more (you have to purchase it as part of Microsoft's Office Suite). But if you've been wanting to organize digital photos into virtual albums and don't already use Microsoft PowerPoint, 3D-Album is definitely worth a look. And if you want to save albums as video files that may be burned onto CDs or DVDs, which may be viewed on DVD-equipped TVs, the DVD Suite may be worth the extra money.
10/21/2003 - Daytrum Editorial Staff