Re: Developing Multimedia

[Michele Marques <mmarques -at- CMS400 -dot- COM>]

Lisa Depenbrock <lisa -dot- depenbrock -at- US -dot- FICSGRP -dot- COM> asks for
recommendations on multimedia development products (for
developing web-distributed materials) that are easy-to-use, easy-to-
learn and cheap.

I don't believe that there is a product to meet all three of those
requirements. Multimedia, when done well, usually takes lots of
time to produce and will usually be expensive, as well. You need to
have a machine that is up to the demands (speed, memory, disk
space at a minimum - perhaps expensive peripherals), the software
to develop the audio clips, video clips, and/or animations is not
cheap, and purchasing ready-made multi-media elements can be
expensive.

Your cheapest route would be to use existing tools to create web
pages, but if you are not already familiar with HTML, the pages
may not look great - depending on what tools you have. For the
multimedia portion, I would question what you are trying to
accomplish with multimedia, especially as it is often slow to
download. If you are designing tutorials, perhaps text with
screenshots (kept small and one per web page) might work best.

There are cheap tools for creating simple animations (e.g.,
animated GIFs, using Javascript to move animations around the
screen, etc.) but they are not necessarily easy to learn.

For more specific advice about various tools, feel free to contact
me privately.

     - Michele

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Michele Marques
Technical Writer, CMS Manufacturing Systems
mmarques -at- cms400 -dot- com
905-477-4499 x280

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