Lets see. MacroMind Director 3.0 was about $649, perhaps less with an
educational discount. Swivel 3-d would be around the same. Infini-D is realy
remarkable for a Mac based ray-tracing and 3-d rendering, but as far as I know
its 1.1 for-sale version was projected for $1000. Nothing is cheap. There is
a few public domain that I have yet to test that are portable to different
platforms including the macintosh.
 
        As for how do you 3-d a picture, video or otherwise, classic way would
be to shape the objects yourself in these programs. The Amiga (hush! hush!)
has a program that allows you to extrude on a colour, which basicaly means that
one could ask the computer to make everything on the screen that was red a
three dimensional object. The initial problem however would be that if the
picture was a solid red filled circle, then you would get a solid red column
rather than a sphere.
 
        Bret Kulakovich.