5 stars (Truely Amazing Animation Works) - I must truly applaud the staff on their extraordinary animation works. The variety and originality in various 3D effects is very apparent. Being the first timer to adopt the 3D technology in my business, I'd like to share my experience as a previously upset user but turned out to be a very pleased customer -- inadequate system resources or graphic card configurations (e.g., the cheep integrated video card) are the main reason that I have had continuous problems in performance and quality. Once this has been resolved, everything turns to be very smooth and great. Many evidences of this kind of change similar to my experience can be seen in the public community forum from the 3D-Album website.
Being only moderately knowledgeable on computers, the software does require some learning curve for me. It is not a wizard-driven program for beginners. After getting familiar with necessary terminology and concepts, I found the program to be quite easy to work with. More to the point, folks at support as well as in the community forum are very helpful. I've learned a lot from them and now quite knowledgeable in this area. Fewer software products today can provide such a great and dedicated support. Good results can be seen by many examples that users have posted in the community forum, ranging from novice to professional.
1 stars (Poor Quality Software) - This software is difficut to use, slow (even on my P4 3.2GHz HT w/ 1GB RAM), and doesn't do everything that the box and the users guide states. The tech support is poor, and they apparently do not understand proper english.
5 stars (Superior to my expectation) - I bought this new version because I love the photo show made by the version 2.03, hoping there is a great enhancement in the new version. The product lives up to my expectation - show styles in the new version have improved a lot! Though not all styles favor my taste, it is my choice, and there are plenty of styles to choose from. Moreover, the Picture Pro edition let me change themes easily, for example, I can paint my own book covers and design pages for the 3D flipping book, and change the room and table settings.One new feature I like particularly is the "My Albums" list. Now, I can keep a track of my built albums (I've built a lot!) and make any change of any album whenever I want to. I don't understand why there is a need to save, as one reviewer wrote. The album I built is the copy that saved from the preview. I can make the change of the copy using the same GUI controls I use during preview. There is no need to dig into the album files. Perhaps the reviewer is commenting on the version 2.03, which cannot be applied to this version. I am an amateur photographer, and occasionally use Jasc Paint Shop to do some preliminary photo editing works. I didn't expect that 3D-Album Picture Pro come with a great photo editor, and did not even give it a try until the last weekend when I decide to create my own book cover. Holly cow, I can't believe that an album software come with such a powerful photo editor that is even better than my dedicated editing software. Jasc's tube brush is always my favorite but making my own tube is rather difficult. In Picture Pro, I simply create an image group and then drag and drop image into the group. I am very impressed by the Picture Pro's 3D layer styles and vector illustration tools. I clicked the book cover image in the Photo Show page, choose the edit menu, and the software brings the book cover directly into the editor where I can put my own design. I can switch back and forth between the Photo Show page and the edit page until I get a happy result. I bought the version 2.03 about one and half years ago. I remember there was a problem with my old HP laptop (not with my desktop) with S3 video card. The software will crash after running about 5 minutes. The support told me that the crash is due to the bug in the S3 video driver and upgrading the driver will solve this problem. But S3 video card was quite old and the support from HP was discontinued. I eventually got my new Dell Inspiron with GeForce FX. Both the old and new version now run smoothly without any problem. So, before buying the software, you should have a check of your computer. A decent 3D video card such as nVidia's GeForce or ATI's Radoen is the key, no matter how fast your CPU or how much memory your have. |
