Multimedia DVD Creation

[chateaux]

Hi There,

I have been asked to create a multimedia DVD. I have never done this before and am not sure what the process is and was hoping that someone would be able to point me in the right direction.

Basically what I am looking for is a navigatable web site on disk including video clips and quite a bit of information. The company in question wishes to use this disk to send to prospective employeesinforming them about their company.

Has anyone created something like this before - is it any different to creating a normal web site?

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Brendan

[Ulysses]

You need some more spec than that, chateaux. Is the Multimedia DVD for computer use? Home DVD-Players? or both? If you need to develop a Home DVD, then you need software to create DVD-Video, and last but most importantly, you need decide how you wish to put it together ... all in one program such as Macromedia Director, Macromedia Flash, one of numerous all-in-one softwares you can find scattered around the net, or, just linked web pages with video links on them (which will be easiest to do if you're able to do that) perhaps just written direct to the disc like a conventional cdr would be, and maybe even use a freebie piece of software to autor-run the index page to help keep it all together. Oh ... and we haven't even touched the MAC/PC issue ...

I suspect (without clearer details) you'd be best off with the latter, which is easiest, and low to no cost.

[chateaux]

Hi Ulysses,

Thank you for your reply.

The multimedia DVD is for computer and not for home DVD player.

I have been searching around and it seems that a good authoring tool such as Studio Pro should be used.

To be honest I am undecided wether I should go DVD route or if I should go Web Site route (and keeping it together with a script like you suggested). Version one is going to be more content orientated with a little video but this may change as we have more time to collect footage.

Ideally I will find a designer with a 5G Mac with authoring knowledge who will put the site together.

The majority of our users will be using a home PC to view the DVD/CDR.

Thank you for your feedback.

[chateaux]

You know - my solution is going to be as follows:

1. Create a normal web site with content.
2. Link this to whatever video clips I want the potential clients to see.
3. I will use an Autorun.inf file to load the site.
4. The video clips will be in AVI format which windows media can read.

This to me seems the simplest and most cost effective. If anyone has any input or ideas, i would appreciate them.

[Ulysses]

Certainly would be easiest thing to do, to meet your criteria, though Flash or Director would allow you to embed the video in a more exciting way. Regarding autorun ... to help you (should you be unaware that by default, autorun won't work with html files), this will be useful for you: http://www.burzurq.com/forum/autorun_html.html

Regarding video, make double-sure that you don't use any fancy codecs. If you can, try and encode as .mov files. These tend to be more reliable for playback, should you or your viewers be unfamiliar with the plethera of problems that video formats can cause.

If you get stuck, just post back here.

[retro]

do your movies in quicktime format. macromedia director is great for this kind of project, but since you might not have lingo programming experience, id say go the flash route. (if you dont know lingo, dont try and learn it for this project. learn it on your own time. its one of the most irritating programming languages ive ever worked with).

but like i said, do the project in flash. you might actually have some fun ith it.