About MULTIMEDIA and related topics, please, tell me somethi

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Thu Nov 14, 2002 10:58 pm

About MULTIMEDIA and related topics, please, tell me something…

Whom of you are into Multimedia apart from Retro? I would like to know more about it. I want to go into the world of Multimedia a little deeper, cos I like it more and more…

Web Page authoring:

What programs do you use? What do you recommend?

Anybody working with Macromedia Director 8.5? What sort of jobs do you do with it?

What hardware, basically, do you need for a basic Multimedia setup?

I would love for anybody to open my mind, to give me some advice pointing me out some good webs… cos there are so… so many about Multimedia that I don’t know were to start. There are thousands of programs for this purpose. For instance, about 300 programs only, to create 3D objects… Wow!

Isn’t it an wonderfully interesting world?

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 1:23 am

My day job is to produce enterprise web site, like transactional stuff etc. I work daily with designer and graphists, and i've been doing this for the last 12 years. Allmost all of them use photophop, Flash studio or MX and Freehand for their 'art' parts.

For the web page authoring, most of them use Eclipse (free from eclipse.org) or the commercial version of eclipse from IBM called 'Websphere Application Developer' or WSAD for short.

This is also the tool for programmers like me. This is a single tool (or IDE) that support many differents languages, from Java, C++, C#, XML and alike, Perl, and some others even more exotic.

Personnaly, i use the commercial version, since i use professionnaly, i need it to be always up to date and have commercial support.

If you want to create a dynamic web site from scratch to production level code, this is the tool of choice. It can manage all files from a project, or many project at the same time. Can version it, deploy it, profile it, debug it, etc...

For example, planetZ site could be done entirely inside WSAD. High level modelisation in UML (analysis design, functional design, implementation design), code generation, prototyping, programmation, web page design. Even testing can be done inside the IDE using the integrated web server and database system (from HSQLDB, DB2, Oracle, or whatever).

If all you want is to put some animation contents, or something like this, all you need is Flash MX or Studio + notepad

Is this what you asked?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: marcuspocus on 2002-11-15 01:27 ]</font>

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 3:50 pm

Thanks for your answer newborn Pulsar Guru.

12 years working on it… you must know what you are talking about!

Well, yes, everybody has told me that Photoshop is the best graphic tool in the market and the most widely used too, sort of Cubase VST for the music market I guess.

Flash well, I know nothing but I can see that graphics made with it are fantastic and Freehand it’s convenient cos you can fuse it well with the other Macromedia MX products.

I never heard about the WSAD, I guess it’s not an easy thing to learn cos it’s mostly for a programming purpose.

I want to be able to create interactive CDROM presentations for enterprises and educational purposes, to creating nice up to date web pages. Generalizing what I want to be able to do I could say: To handle multimedia, i.e. audio, graphics, animation, video, text, to create CDROMs and Webs, that’s it.

I’m a complete beginner to it, so whatever you tell me it’s just fine, cheers!

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 3:55 pm

BTW, so no body at your office uses Macromedia Dreamweaver at all to build web pages? I’m surprised cos I know, reading statistics and stuff, that about 85% of the market is headed by Dreamweaver. What do you think yourself of this one?

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 4:14 pm

Well, read again those statistics...Cuz Macromedia cannot be used efficiently in TEAM environment, cuz it doesn't integrate with standard versionning system like Clearcase, CVS, PVCS etc...

But almost all graphists and web designers know it for making STATIC web site...

By static i mean, not accessing transactions, enterprise backend, server side process, security etc...

It is cool though for what you want to do...

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 4:58 pm

So I should go getting started with Photoshop, Flash MX, Freehand and Dreamweaver, anything else you think it is important in here? It’s already a lot! I’m going to expend at least a year for learning such huge programs!

Thanks for your answer Marcus.

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 4:59 pm

Just always keep web page code the cleanest you can... save HUGE amount of time later on...

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 5:20 pm

BTW, any recommendations about hardware, is there a standard for it?

Should I get some special card like the ATI RADEON 9700 PRO ($290) Graphics Cards or something similar. What do you use for it guys?

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 5:31 pm

No need for anything special... Matrox is perfectly suited for multimedia stuff... Nice colors, hi refresh rate, low flickers, and nice fonts display...

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 6:15 pm

Thanks Marcus

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 9:59 pm

I'm running the Macromedia StudioMX suite on my DAW with absolutely no problems at all. I do all web development work on it then zip the site and transfer it to my net PC for upload.

Unless you're thinking of the high pro-end then StudioMX will give you more power than you're ever likely to use.

If you want to keep things cheap I'd recommend getting a hold of Dreamweaver 3, Fireworks 4 and Swish 2.0. With that package you can design virtually anything and get some very slick things happening.

Web design is a sideline for me, I do quite a bit as a hobby or for friends. Sometimes I do some paid work, but I'm not really looking for work in that area.

What I am currently trying to sell to a major media group here is a cheap web-video system. I'm hoping to hear whether I've got the contract in the next couple of weeks !

If they say yes then I'm going to do three or four pilot videos myself: film the interviews, collect third party footage, edit it, encode it for the web and hand it over to their web techs. I might even put some original music under one of them

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 10:29 pm

That is very cool spirit.. This is really where i want to go, mixing my two hobby togheter :

Music and programming...

Really, i wish you the best of luck to this project and envy you a bit...

Let us know what it look like when oit's done! I'd be very curious

!

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Mon Nov 18, 2002 1:43 am

Thanks Spirit! No, in fact, I’m not talking of becoming kind of Marcuspocus or something like that… I just want to build up CDROMs and Webs, with a good quality outcome yes, but not pointing to the best. I’m not ready to go there anyway. I want to learn the basics first of all, cos I’m just beginning... I see there are quite a few of you that are in fact into the business already, including Retro.

I’ll stick to the Macromedia MX in the future if I can so. I cannot buy anything right now, but I can always go to my friend’s office he he… It is there that I got to know this incredible package, which amazed me much; I can probably get started doing some introductory Multimedia just reading tutorials. He has not spare time to teach me anything... My girlfriend, in the other hand, is a good hand-graphic artist and so we want to join our efforts doing something interesting together, that is the idea.

Hope you get this contract Spirit, if this is what you want, you’ll get it, sure!

Well Marcus, so we are looking for the same thing exactly! Well, almost, cos for you music and deep “programming”, for me, music and webbing.

So will I, we want to see your job done Spirit.

I guess, if you don’t mind and it’s all right for you, I would like to ask you guys some questions about all this, now and then, while I learn. Hope this is ok for you.

Cheers.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: nestor on 2002-11-18 01:44 ]</font>

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Wed Nov 20, 2002 8:27 pm

So… nobody else doing multimedia in here?