| Multimedia Production
Why force your customers to call on the phone and take up the precious time of your marketing staff when a multimedia CD-ROM could answer all of their most esoteric questions? With a multimedia CD, customers can view your products in 3-D, watch video of how the product is made, or hear interviews from other satisfied customers. Then have a link from the CD to the web, so they can place an online order!
There are three important things to remember before starting work on a CD-ROM:
1) CD-ROM production is very complex.
The decision to create a CD-ROM can give you a key advantage in grabbing your audience's attention. Unlike a website, a CD-ROM can give your audience instant access to volumes of media-rich information. A CD-ROM can hold up to 650 MB of graphics, sound, text, and video, while a website is usually less than 10 MB. With all this content, organization becomes a tremendous challenge. Outline very clearly what you want in the presentation. If the designer starts the project thinking there are only 3 main sections and no more than 5 sub sections, adding more sections half way into the project can easily put the project over budget and past the deadline.
2) CD-ROM technology is limited in speed and capacity.
While full-screen animation and CD-quality sound are a nice change of pace from the crawling images on the web, only the newest CD-ROM drives and computers will be able to play this media smoothly. Keep sound files small and video clips to half-screen. This will ensure the program loads quickly and the CD will play smoothly.
3) Your audience's computer equipment is a huge consideration in the production of the presentation.
Unlike a website or video, CD-ROMs are a media where the playback device can vary drastically. Everyone's browser is designed to play the same files, and everyone's VCR is designed to play the same tapes. This is not the case with everyone's computer. Video cards, sound cards, installed software, RAM, hard drive space, and processor speed are all factors which can affect CD-ROM playback performance. |
