Editor's Pick: Photo DVD Maker Professional
More and more programs for creating Photo DVD Maker Pro become popular, such as Ulead Pictureshow and Photo DVD Maker Pro. With these well developed slideshow software, you can now burn your photos to a DVD or CD to play on many home DVD player sets. Compares with Ulead, Photo DVD Maker Pro works in easier way and the final result is also amazing and eye-catching.
Product Introduction
With Photo DVD Maker Professional, you can quickly build eye-catching slide shows when you're in a hurry and spend a little more time designing audiovisual masterpieces when the creative mood strikes. Flexible output options ensure that your slideshows will get seen, and, at $59.95 direct, the software is highly affordable.
Pros
- Ease of use as well as the interface
- Lots of customization options for slide and menu page
- Hundreds of transitions with preview capability.
- Customizable ken burns effect with preview capability
- Ability to copy customized kenburns effect to other slides saves time when you need to use same customized effect to more than one slide
- Output many formats: VCD, SVCD, and DVD burning with DVD menus as well as video formats, including FLV, MPEG-4, AVI
- Professional-looking album themes and menu templates
- Built-in Smart-Encoding makes the burning finish quickly while burning the same project or a saved project with a few changes
Cons
- Non-English characters not supported in Credits page
- Few customizations can make in Album theme unlike in menu templates
- Some windows are a fixed size and it would be nice to resize them for a smaller preview.
- Lack of Undo function
- For Windows only.
Summary
Photo DVD Maker gives lots of customizable options to users in easy way. Even the computer beginners can use the program without looking any guidance. The professional but animated slideshow can be finished in the easiest way
Editor's Review
Photo DVD Maker may be the easiest photo slideshow software on the market. This program is the key to a memorable, media-heavy, stunning DVD slideshow presentation with customizable text and sound tracks. Its focus is on the photo and effects. Photo DVD Maker Pro is a strong choice if your goal is to produce a good-looking DVD slideshow quickly.
The main interface of Photo DVD Maker Pro is one of the most user-friendly I have seen. Once you run the program, you know clear that you can create photo slideshow in three steps: organize photos, choose menus and burn to disc.
Photo DVD Maker combines Windows-Explore like panel for finding images and audios you want to use in the slideshow. The well-designed software makes the workflow very efficient. For example, you can add all photos in selected folder by clicking one button to apply preset transitions randomly and click one button to sync the slideshow with background music perfectly.
For most of people, the music is one of the most important elements in the DVD slideshow. In Photo DVD Maker Pro, various audio formats as well as sources are supported, You can add music in mp3, wav and wma directly from the computer, rip audio tracks from the CD, record your own sound or narration. But the protected music, including iTunes music, is not supported like other slideshow software. The ability to adjust the volume of all added audio files would be a nice bonus. The current version can only adjust the volume of recorded sound.
Ken burns effect is the popular feature in slideshow software. One of the most useful options in Photo DVD Maker is the Copy and Paste customized effect. The program allows you to customize the pan&zoom by setting accurate zoom and pan number as well as the rotation. Once you need to use one customized effect to other photos, you don’t need to do the customization again but click the Copy Position on the source slide and then click Paste Position on the target photo. This makes the creation very efficient when you need to use one pan and zoom to other photos in the DVD slideshow. To my surprise, the preview of customized pan and zoom is available in the program so I don’t need to preview the whole slideshow to check the effect.
There are two Themes in the software. One is the Album Theme and the other is the Menu. Album theme is for each album, but menu for the whole slideshow. One DVD slideshow may consist of multiple albums.
More than 80 DVD menu templates are for the selection. Different styles may meet different requirements, but the lack of some simple and solemn templates for business presentation and religious occasions may prevent some people from using it. Photo DVD Maker offers a true DVD preview, with fully operational motion and still menus.
A variety of output formats is provided in Photo DVD Maker. Besides burning slideshow on DVD or CD for TV playback, you can also create slideshow in various video formats, such as FLV and MPEG-4 which are supported by YouTube. But for these video output, DVD menu does not work since the menu is only for SVCD and DVD. Except this, the output interests me most is the Web Album format. Actually, you can output HTML file with SWF format of the slideshow inserted. You can extract the SWF slideshow from the output of the HTML file if you know something about HTML code.
The lack of high-powered image editing is my only complaint. Except some basic image process, the program does not provide options to resize the photo and correct the red-eyes.
