A short film adds something extra to your presentation. Use this resource wisely to give life to your application in a way that text, image and audio fail to do.
Use film to show, instruct, entertain and fascinate the user.
Keep in mind however, that a short film with plenty of information demands a lot of the computer's resources. For this reason, avoid showing films longer than 30 seconds, as you risk putting too much of a burden on the computer with longer films
MultiMedia Lab V supports the film formats Mpeg, Quicktime and AVI
This is a 600 KB Mpeg film that is 27 seconds long.
Background sound. A looped environment sound is played on this site and it is a good idea to provide users with a way to switch it off, as with the buttons in this example. Other examples of background sounds include melodies, traffic and school noise, etc.
Sounds give a presentation more life and entertainment value. They also have an important pedagogical value. They make the presentation more informative and easier to use.
What is important about sounds in multimedia presentations is that the sound files should not be too big. The same goes for images and films.
Useful sound files for MultiMedia Lab V are wav, aiff, midi, mp3 and so on.
Button sounds. Button sounds give the user control in the form of sound effects, either with MouseOver or OnClick.
The speaker adds information or reads the text on the screen out loud, which is perfect for instructions and storie. Unfortunately, Long speaker texts can also make the user lose interest if they do not add anything new to the presentation.
Sound effects give the presentation an entertainment value that captures the user's interest. This function can be used together with animations, page jumps and button audio.
Text is a complement to images and sounds. It can, however, be a bit tiring to read long texts on screen.
It is important to choose a font that is easy to read. It is also a good idea to choose one of the standard fonts like Times or Arial. Most of the text in this presentation has the font Verdana, size 10.
The font should not be too big. This is size 16, which sometimes can be too big and clumsy.
Size 12 is a suitable size for the font.
Do not use bold characters too often, as they may strain the eyes of users.
The same can be said about texts in italics. However, italics can serve you well if you want to stress certain parts of the text.
Divide the text into paragraphs. It is much easier to read a text with paragraphs, unlike this one. There should have been a new paragraph at the beginning of this sentence, but the text just continues on and on until the reader loses interest.
The choice of colors is also important. Studies have been made of which color combinations are most suitable as text and background colors. The best combination proved to be black text against a yellow background.
In a multimedia presentation the text must be legible and presentable. One way to create a legible text is to do what we have done here. We have placed transparent rectangles behind the text, which displays the text and background in a harmonic way.
If you write text against a background like this, the text gets blurred despite what color you use.
The main part of a multimedia presentation consists of a combination of images and text, but the images generate most of the attention. However, it is also possible to use only text in a presentation, if that is the purpose of it.
Images such as photos, drawings, animations, buttons and backgrounds can be used in a presentation.
If you use a digtal camera, you can take pictures that can downloaded to a computer without scanning. The pictures are saved in the computer's hard drive or on a floppy disk.
If you use an ordinary camera, you must scan the pictures before you can use them in a computer.
When the scanning is done, the picture can be edited in an image editing program. It is possible to make adjustments in the program and add certain filters and effects until you are satisfied with the result.
Drawings are always a nice compliment to photos. You can make a drawing with the computer's drawing program. You can also draw on a paper first and then scan the picture. It is also possible to make animations. An animation is a series of pictures which are showed in close succession. Move the cursor over the ball to the right of the scanner to show a small animation - a series of 8 pictures.
