Customer Reviews

Multimedia Making It Work

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is THE book for serious multimedia producers and managers! Covers everything from hardware and software specs to design and production, to managing a project right down to final delivery in multiple formats and media. Read Designing Multimedia by Lisa Lopuck for novices and entry level multimedia producers. Read Multimedia Making it Work by Tay Vaughan for advanced and in depth material for the serious manager/producer. Would have been nice though if Macromedia could have kept there cd that came with the 3rd edition book in with the 4rth edition. I also reccommend the book Getting Started in Multimedia Design by Gary Olsen as a quick and comprehensive guide to designing multimedia and web projects.

I was given this book as a gift and it was invaluable. It's easy to read and provides helpful information. I especially liked the CD ROM. Among the things on the CD is a demo of Macromedia Director. Anyone going into multimedia must learn how to use Director. This demo helped me learn the software without investing $500+ in the software.

This book presents a broad overview of the field of multimedia production. The book describes the field at large, explaining the concepts, rather than focusing on minute details of using particular software packages. Separate chapters are devoted to the multimedia "building blocks", text, sound, images, and video, and the various special characteristics of these media (such as formats and how compression techniques work). A typology of multimedia authoring software is developed, and brief descriptions of individual authoring packages are provided to exemplify each type. The accompanying CD-ROM contains evaluation copies of many of the packages mentioned (such as Macromedia Director, Adobe Freehand, and SoundEdit) for further exploration by the reader. The book also provides extensive coverage of the multimedia development process, from the roles of the members of a multimedia development team, to planning, costing, producing, testing, and delivering products. I have found the book to be quite successful as a textbook for introduction to multimedia courses. It would also be useful for anyone who would like to understand what the multimedia business is all about.

This has been one of the leading books for the field. Most useful in a advanced HS or College course.

However the material is becoming dated. Needs a newer focus on the new interactive media environment that integrates internet applications rather than thinking of the "web" and "multimedia" as two areas. They have merged!

The book publisher and author needs to study the fields using multimedia such as advertising and the ad agencies, marketing agencies, entertainment agencies, eLearning companies and functions, entire web sites based on interactive multimedia in large companies and so on.

Still has value but will need a lot of field experience to sift through what is current and what is just old history.

Book was fine, it arrived in time and in good condition. My only real issue with this book was that it was outdated when I got it--which was only a couple years ago (3 to be exact). It shouldn't be used as a textbook in modern day classrooms.

Great introduction to the world of multimedia. Being a beginner myself, I found the book to be both informative and practical. it is a great reference source and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in a multimedia career.

Of course this book is now seriously outdated, but if you are tempted to pick it up cheap, I'd recommend against it, because it was outdated and full of useless filler even when it was published in 2003. Outdated information from previous editions was left to pile up, so this book is more of a history book than a description of the state of the art at the time. Other info belongs in other textbooks. For example, the description of how the Internet works (IP addresses and such) isn't relevant to multimedia production.

There are also a bunch of sidebars that are supposed to be entertaining or deep. I found most of them to be boring and self-indulgent.

I paid a few cents for it, literally. There is a whole lot of a difference between this edition and the seventh edition. A few questions and key terms have been changed but all of the important material has remained unchanged.

The year of the book is handy to know as you do not want to buy a book out of date.
The book I bought was exactly as describes.