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CREATE YOUR FIRST ALBUM
Before you BEGIN, you need to PREPARE
The great thing about 3D-Album that sets it apart from simple slide show programs
is that it doesn't just show photo after photo with transitions between photos and maybe
a few curling photos dropping down. With 3D-Album you can choose from many different styles.
Some of these styles allow you to have your photos displayed on a spinning frame, on a spinning
photo spindle, against moving backgrounds, sliding in front of and behind each other, and more.
You can combine several styles, so you don't lose your audience's attention. I will refer to
each style as an album segment. The actual album can consist of one or more album segments.
I will show you how to build your first segment, and I will then show you how to combine your
segments together into a single album.
Gather your photos/images, select the styles that you want to use,
and decide how you will order them and which pictures will be used in each style segment.
Create an overall folder for the event (call it .../PROJECT),
and then copy all of the pictures that you want to include in the total
project into that folder.
If the pictures are bigger then 1024x768, reduce them down to that
size. Also, if your images are greater then 72dpi, then reduce them to
72dpi - bigger settings, like 300dpi are best for prints, not PC monitors.
Note: This was important when working with older PCs. Today, the PCs and
video cards are so advanced that you can often get by without reducing your
photo images. There are a few 3DTime styles where the number and size of the
photos may cause problems - but by and large you can probably skip this step.
Some styles work best with portrait orientations, and some styles work best
with landscape orientations. There are some styles that can have both landscape
and portrait images together with no problems. If your pictures are cut off at
the top or bottom (or the sides), then you probably are trying to use the wrong
type pictures for that style. See the Problems, Tips, and Solutions section for
more on this.
Convert your images to jpegs and your sound files to mp3s. (Not an
absolute requirement, but recommended for your first album).
See Problems. Tips, and Solutions section.
After converting any problem images or sound files, set up individual
sub-folders, one for each style that you'll be using (call them
.../PROJECT/PICTURE_SET_01, .../PROJECT/PICTURE_SET_02, etc.)
and move the pictures into the appropriate folders.
Now, at this point you have the pictures organized and ready to go.
Before you start building the actual album segments, create another set of folders
that will hold the finished album segments (one for each style). Just to be clear,
I'm suggesting that you have 2 sets of folders. One set contains the pictures that
you want to use in your album. The 2nd set of folders will contain the actual albums
that 3D-Album will build/create for you.
Again, we'll start with a master folder. Let's pretend that we're building a
wedding album. Name the master (high level) folder ...MYALBUM/WEDDING.
Create sub-folders and name these ...MYALBUM/WEDDING/ALBUM01, ...MYALBUM/WEDDING/ALBUM02,
and so forth.
What's in a name? You'll notice that I don't use any blanks in my names.
This is because blanks inside folder and file names sometimes cause problems.
For example, if you plan to create an autorun CD, the album name cannot contain
any blanks. Avoid blanks now, and you won't have problems later. Also,
use short names if you're using MIDI music files. The Windows Media Player
does not play a MIDI file with path longer than 142 characters.
OK, You're ready to BEGIN.