Magix Xtreme PhotoStory CD & DVD Deluxe was ranked our #1 photo slideshow product for its impressive feature set and ease-of-use. Xtreme PhotoStory on CD & DVD 8 is just as easy to use and comes close in features to its bigger brother. It is among those few that provides powerful customization features at the same time making it easy to create a slideshow through an intuitive interface, templates, helpful wizards to get you going and a great Help system. And that’s why Xtreme PhotoStory CD & DVD Deluxe 8 is our "TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award" winner.
Magix Xtreme Photostory still has most of the features that we consider to be necessary for photo slideshow software including the ability to zoom and animate photos (Ken Burns effect), timing control for each slide or the entire show, multiple transitions to choose from, text captions and animations, multiple music tracks with the ability to edit the timing of each, and much more. We will go into more detail on the feature set later but we just wanted to point out here that they key difference between this version and the Deluxe version is the inability to publish in HD (high definition) or Blu-ray. There are of course many other differences that we will touch on later in our review.
Standout Features:
- Powerful Photo Editing program
- Impressive Sharing and Publishing options
- Nice, clean user interface
- Slideshow wizard to step you through the process of creating a slideshow
- Robust Help and Support
- 3D text animations
- Widescreen export capabilities
Like the Deluxe version, the standard version of Magix Xtreme PhotoStory on CD & DVD has a built-in Slideshow Wizard that launches every time you open the program. It will guide you through each of the steps to create a slideshow, from importing pictures and/or videos, applying effects, applying music and sharing it. Scroll-over functionality facilitates learning how to use the program in what could otherwise take long term use and equal measures of trial, error and guesswork in most other photo slideshow programs. On top of that, Xtreme PhotoStory CD & DVD provides a well-stocked Help Menu with tutorial videos, tool tips and instant access to its Magix Info Multimedia Knowledge Community as an additional resource.
Xtreme PhotoStory CD & DVD also includes multiple paths to customize your slides so you can do just about whatever you want from anywhere. These design features help facilitate quick and painless photo slideshow development but never at the expense of personalization, modification and carte blanche design. Another benefit to the user is that all of the effects, transitions and animations are applied simply by looking at examples and dragging and dropping the effect you like to the photo. You don’t have to manually control the start and stop points in an animation. After just a short few minutes or so of playing with the program, we found it easy to do whatever we were trying to do.
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