Animate 2d photos into 3d in video
 

I am trying to find this software that allows you to take a 2d photo and manipulate it as thought its a moving picture. anyone here - can you name a few products that do this?

can you be a little more specific? what are you trying to do with it? are you looking to make a picture of a room feel 3d, or a family portrait with layers?

The new photoshop CS3 has a 3d feature where you map out space ontop of a photo. When you bring it into After effects CS3 you can make a camera and zoom in and out of this 3d space, that uses your photos as textures.
There was another program in development that could do this, but I don't know what it is.

If you're using Mac, Motion will do it.

If you want the pics to act like a movie then for PC the program is
called Photo Story 3

Premiere and FCP are both capable as well, though the actual 3D movement is limited, not that you'll really want to rotate on the X or Y axis with a 2D object anyway. I'd assume the same applies to Vegas, etc.
Any compositing app will, from AE to motion to combustion, shake, nuke, etc.

You can map out a 3d space in a photo with any special effects program?

Search for camera mapping (example).

One thing to keep in mind though is that example is shown using Maya, a pretty intense 3D app. Further, it utilizes projection mapping, which is fine if you're working with objects made up of flat surfaces, (like a cardboard box and floor), cylindrical objects, or spherical objects. You're not going to be able to do this with say, a picture of a flower, and then "presto", turn your 2D flower picture into 3D flower that can be viewed at all kinds of different angles. Not to mention that projection mapping itself can get a bit tricky. Sometimes the images line up on the surfaces very easily, sometimes it can be really finicky to get it right.

I'm not sure what the original posters intent is. The technique that being used a lot these days is to take a photograph, cut out the people in the foreground in Photoshop, and then blend/clone the background. The idea is to create one layer that is the person or persons separate from the background. These two layers can then be brought into a program that supports 3D camera movement, like After Effects, Motion, but even something like Maya would work as well.
The two layers are then placed a different points of depth (z space), and scaled so that the image still looks "normal" when viewed straight on from the front. When the camera tracks/dollies the movement reveals the perspective change, creating a very distinct effect. However, you're still working with flat images in 3D space. The images have width, and height (x,y) but no depth. If you applied depth with something like Zaxworks Invigorator, the depth would be based on the alpha channel of the layer, so it would essentially look like a cardboard cutout of the image.
No software out there is going to be able to automatically look at a 2D image of a person, and then from that single image, with a mouse click create a full, realistic, accurate 3D rendering of that person. If there were, 3D modelers would be out of work and we'd all be taking snap shots of anything and everything and rendering it in 3D.

There are some really great tutorials out there on how people have "fooled" the camera using 2D layers and 3D cameras in After Effects to create 3D looking sets, but again, these techniques are well thought out, and executed with the limitations of the process kept in mind.

I use Cinema 4D instead of Maya, but the basic technique is the same for most any higher end 3D modeling software.

If you have front and side views of the person you can place them in your 3D app and then use them as the basis to develop a pretty reasonable 3D model of the person or thing - sort of building geometry over the picture.

It just takes practice - lots and lots and lots of practice - to get anything that looks good in a reasonable amount of time.

And then you have the challenge of applying the images to the model as textures.

It can be done, but it's not easy or quick. Poser has some capabilities along these lines, but I've never been hugely successful with them.