Maybe multimedia seems like an unreachable pinnacle, something that requires a studio full of white lab coats to pull off. The reality is that today, almost everyone can create some sort of multimedia presentation and at one time or another most everyone thinks about just that. An explanation of your perpetual motion theory to load onto a floppy and mail to all the think tanks, an animated family history complete with period music, digitized daguerreotypes, and voice-over correspondence that lives on your hard drive, or a full-blown epic adventure of a man, a motorcycle, and a modem in a quest for truth that fills the entire Jaz cartridge. And while itΓÇÖs still a complex task, the state of the art is such that most of those everyones can fulfill that wish. Heck. If you get ambitious, burn the thing to a CD-R.
For all its complexities, the basic multimedia presentation consists of only five elements: text, audio, video, graphics, and what has come to be called ΓÇ£authoring.ΓÇ¥ While each of these categories contains a world of subcategories, trials, techniques, and other considerations, it helps to have an overview.
