Pictures To CD & DVD

Rating:
Summary: Terrible product!
Review: After my recent vacation, I was excited to find this program and to share copies of my digital pictures with friends and family who could watch them on their TVs. The program had some nice features and seemed easy to use. Unfortunately, I spent too much time putting my slideshow together without testing the end result first. The pictures I took were high resolution (1200x1600) but the resulting quality when watching the CD on my TV was very poor.

Rating:
Summary: Poor picture quality
Review: After my recent vacation, I was excited to find this program and to share copies of my digital pictures with friends and family who could watch them on their TVs. The program had some nice features and seemed easy to use. Unfortunately, I spent too much time putting my slideshow together without testing the end result first. The pictures I took were high resolution (1200x1600) but the resulting quality when watching the CD on my TV was very poor.

Rating:
Summary: Looks easy to use, but it's not
Review: At first glance this software looks easy to use: drag and drop your photos, and viola, you have a slideshow. But the software is not at all user friendly so you end up spending your whole time trying to figure it out. I spent my first 15 minutes just trying to find the browser button so I could upload some photos! Turns out it was a miniscule obscure button about the size of a fingernail sliver. The manual is useless because it tells you to consult the help section, and the help section is a copy of the manual. The "Create CD/DVD" part of the software is even more confusing. You end up resorting to clicking on everything in sight to see what happens, and then you have to wait and wait because the software is so slow. I started wondering if I was having problems with my mouse or computer, but no, it was the software.

If after all this work at least I had ended up with a decent slideshow, I would have given this a 3 star rating. But I wasn't able to get anything usable. There are tons of bugs in the audio, so that when you add backround music you end up erasing photos, eliminating the audio track of the videos, changing the times the photos are displayed, or the whole thing simply crashes.

On top of all of this, the software doesn't do what it advertises and what I bought it specifically to do: create presentations that can be copied onto a CD-Rom and seen on a computer. Turns out that in CD-Rom format you can copy the photos, but not the videos. And the sound tracks also don't copy as backround music but as separate tracks. Or at least that's what I think. I can't be sure because the playback software which automatically copies onto the CD-Rom is so incredibly confusing that I never did figure it out.

I have yet to try to make a copy of my presentation in VCD format for my DVD player. Maybe that will work out better, but I'm not holding my breathe.

I really regret having bought this, especially considering all the other options there are out there. Keep looking and buy some other software for your photo slideshows!

Rating:
Summary: To many bugs
Review: At first this software seems so cool. I was excited to be able to drag and drop my images onto a timeline and then add narration. Unfortunately this software comes with many bugs.

First, if you choose a file name and location for the audio files you record, the software ignores them and uses its own name and location. Second when I tried to type a name for an audio file, every time I hit the 'N' key it started recording which wasn't what I wanted to do. I had to avoid using an 'N' in the filename which the software ignored anyway. These were just two of the more irritating bugs.

Additionally claimed functionality is difficult to figure out. The help menu and documentation are so basic they are useless. I found as much help just reading the box it came in.

I went to the Magix website and found a patch for this software. I thought great, this should solve at least some of my issues. Not to be... the patch install actually has a bug which prevents the patch from being installed.

If you want this type of software I would look elsewhere. Also, one hint; if you want to play your creations on a DVD player and you want to burn them on CD, make sure your DVD player can use VCD and/or SVCD. Mine doesn't so I couldn't view them on my TV which was what I orriginally wanted.

Rating:
Summary: To many bugs
Review: At first this software seems so cool. I was excited to be able to drag and drop my images onto a timeline and then add narration. Unfortunately this software comes with many bugs.

First, if you choose a file name and location for the audio files you record, the software ignores them and uses its own name and location. Second when I tried to type a name for an audio file, every time I hit the 'N' key it started recording which wasn't what I wanted to do. I had to avoid using an 'N' in the filename which the software ignored anyway. These were just two of the more irritating bugs.

Additionally claimed functionality is difficult to figure out. The help menu and documentation are so basic they are useless. I found as much help just reading the box it came in.

I went to the Magix website and found a patch for this software. I thought great, this should solve at least some of my issues. Not to be... the patch install actually has a bug which prevents the patch from being installed.

If you want this type of software I would look elsewhere. Also, one hint; if you want to play your creations on a DVD player and you want to burn them on CD, make sure your DVD player can use VCD and/or SVCD. Mine doesn't so I couldn't view them on my TV which was what I orriginally wanted.

Rating:
Summary: Pictures to CD & DVD
Review: I was very dissapointed in this software. You can only aquire pictures from a digital camera or a scanner.I have several folders of pictures on my PC hard drive and I can't down load them into this program. 5 emails to Magix about this problem and so far they asked me to send them some of my pictures to look at "?". In there return emails not one gave me a way to down load from my hard drive. This would be a great program except for this one problem.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible product!
Review: I wish I had checked these reviews before I actually bought it. At first, the product seems easy to use. But adding music and aligning it with the photos is the first trouble. I have approximately 100 pictures in the slide show, which should not be too much for a video that I want to play on TV, but the software gets awfully slow. Saving the show resulted in an error message with a couple of hours of work lost.

I thought Magix was a brand name that I can trust. Be careful before you buy it!

Rating:
Summary: Every Feature Has A Bug
Review: This program is so full of bugs it's extremely frustating to use. Examples:

In addition to an upgrade, a separate CD burner patch is required to be downloaded to get a list of supported drives, with note that if your drive is not listed and not brand new, you're out of luck.

If you try to use the playback option while recording audio, i.e., dubbing your voice onto the track while watching the video as you record, you get a soundcard conflict. The only way to dub narration is to turn off the playback option so you can't see whats playing as you speak.

There are no options for volume, background music is too loud to hear narration.

In storyboard mode, the cursor sometimes gets out of sync with the preview, so you don't really know what clip you have selected.

Image editing gets mixed up, if you rotate an image, the next time you select it, it may preview rotated or not.

Rotated images used in the DVD menu don't retain the rotation.

The built in file explorer is difficult to navigate. If you open a directory containing MPG's, the explorer tries to scan through the entire file before displaying the file names. Gigabyte size files take forever.

If you listen/preview a music file with media player (external to this program), the program errors and terminates when you return to it, due to some soundcard driver conflict.

When you click around enough to get a music file selected in the file explorer to play/preview in this program, it sometimes goes into this buzzing mode, then inserts the music file into your project.

Sometimes when you select and drag a music file into your program, the built in windows file explorer jumps to the top of itself and imports a different file than what you selected.