Serious Magic Serious Magic Ovation

• Reviewed by: r2rnot

  Strengths: NONE. This sucker may not work with old systems but does NOT work with new ones.

  Weaknesses: Obsolete software with year old unfulfilled promises from Adobe to update.

  Overall: On their own board Adobe promised to update this potentially exciting PowerPoint add on but has failed to do so. When challenged about the misleading product statements that lured people into buying this relic, instead of product update they finally changed the description to read: Not Compatible With Vista or Office 2007.

• Reviewed by: sailsmart

  Strengths: It was well received and raved about in 2006.

  Weaknesses: No support after office 2003 has been discarded from my system. No backward compatibility. The product is only about a year old and it's redundant.

  Overall: User forums do not resolve questions. It's hard to get support from Microsoft Office and from Adobe on a product which both share features with. One should be able to export ppt easily into Ovation from 2007, but only one slide shows up repeatedly. I've seen the same questions as mine show up on the forum with no adequate resolutions. I should get my money back given that I cannot use this software at all now.

• Reviewed by: Chibbi

  Strengths: - Turn the simplest slides into cool looking full motion 3d animation- Almost to simple to use (could be a weakness)

  Weaknesses: - Doesn't import all the advanced PPT glitz (like autoshape keyframe animation, interactive slide elements and animated gif)- Not for online sharing

  Overall: This software is really for those bullets and images presentation, beyond that their is way to many limitations so its best to stick with pure Powerpoint.I was surprised the trial worked on my 3 years old laptop because its suposed to be a heavy duty 3d HW application and that laptop is weak.So beware do like me and make sure to use the trial first!(I had to use the omega driver on the laptop)But its great to be able now to pamper those ocational simple presentation with a click of a mouse.Good or bad, from the reaction I had I can bet if you are the first one to expose people to Ovation, you will get allot of "how did you do that" type of comments.Tran

• Reviewed by: Infrequentreviewer

  Strengths: It could look beautiful, if it worked

  Weaknesses: Slow importation; unpredictable conversion from PowerPoint; software hangs; awkward user interface

  Overall: I've been using PCs for 20 years, and PowerPoint for a decade, as I lecture frequently. Based on the review in PCWorld, I thought this would be a reasonable purchase.It was not. I have never ever had such trouble with software, as I've had with Ovation. While PowerPoint may be old, at least it works, and I can get work done quickly and predictably. PCWorld should apologize for such a misleading review.SeriousMagic should apologize for releasing such poor and buggy software.

• Reviewed by: skypilota72

  Strengths: What you read on the box. You cannot rate a product that fails to install.

  Weaknesses: A running program would be nice

  Overall: I have tried to install Ovation and failed each time, and have tried this on 3 of my computers.It initially installed and even ran through most of the frames in the powerpoint conversion process, but at the end of the conversion always received the "Unexpected Termination - Illegal Error" box, and this was on all 3 computers!**********************************1st System - Home BuiltTyan Thunder S2885 ANRF MBDual AMD Opterons, 250 CPU'S4 Gigs Reg. Matched RAM (Crucial)1 Terrabyte Raid-0 Striped Data SATA (Maxtor 7500)250 Raid-0 SATA Programs / OS Drive (Maxtor 7500)ATI-AIW 9600 Pro (128 VidRam)Canopus DVStorm II Pro DV-BoardWinXP Pro, SP-2 UpdatedMS Office 2003 ProAdobe Acrobat 6Adobe Photoshop CS1Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5Adobe After Effects 6.5Adobe Encore 1.5Adobe Audition 2.0****************************2nd System - Purchased SystemHP dx5150AMD 64 2.4 GhzAthlon 4000+1GB PC3200 RAM160 GB HDWinXP ProMS Office 2003 Pro********************************3rd System - PurchasedToshiba Qosmio G25-AV513(Just upgraded from MCE to WinXP Pro to use Ovation)******************************I seems that the Ovation product is horribly glitchy. It is had to believe that this will not run on 3 completely different systems. All O/S's, driver sets and applications are checked for updates daily (I am a stickler on that).This product is not supported for WinXp MCE so you must upgrade to the Pro as I did. Their small writing says this on their website regarding support help.I would love to use Ovation on two of my systems, but cannot get this to even install. No helpful info from Serious Magic. Too bad!