What's the best tool to author CD-Rom and DVD-Roms these days?
September 21, 2010 8:48 AM Subscribe
What's the best tool to author CD-Rom and DVD-Roms these days?
I've been working in Macromedia/Adobe Director for years, and it's time to upgrade, since Director is being left behind in favor of Flash. So my question: should I start using Flash for CD/DVD-Rom development? Or is there something else I should be using?
My primary concern is that as far as I can tell Flash is really meant for the Web. The nice thing about Director was that it created a seamless non-browser projector. Can Flash (or something else) do this? What I *don't* want is content that automatically opens in a browser (so, no HTML).
(To answer an obvious question: the reasons the work cannot be just delivered via the web are uninteresting and have to do with the way academic publications are assessed for tenure at my institution).
I've been working in Macromedia/Adobe Director for years, and it's time to upgrade, since Director is being left behind in favor of Flash. So my question: should I start using Flash for CD/DVD-Rom development? Or is there something else I should be using?
My primary concern is that as far as I can tell Flash is really meant for the Web. The nice thing about Director was that it created a seamless non-browser projector. Can Flash (or something else) do this? What I *don't* want is content that automatically opens in a browser (so, no HTML).
(To answer an obvious question: the reasons the work cannot be just delivered via the web are uninteresting and have to do with the way academic publications are assessed for tenure at my institution).
I'd also be interested in more detail about what you need to produce, and what needs to be interactive/multimedia about it.
I produce CD- and DVD-ROMS using the Adobe Creative Suite to create rich-media pdfs which require Adobe Reader to view, since no other pdf viewers will play embedded videos/audio or Flash, AFAIK.
The current version of InDesign (CS5) is replete with features for adding interactivity and rich media to your documents, then exporting to either pdf or Flash, and Acrobat now allows the inclusion of Flash projects inside pdfs, so that would be my recommendation. I've never seen anything that comes close to exploiting all the potential of the rich-media pdf, or any interactive feature that couldn't be reasonably duplicated within a pdf viewed in Reader.
Granted, that's mostly because I haven't seen much evidence that many people are actively trying to exploit the rich-media pdf, and because I don't really know where to look for such evidence. But the tools are definitely there, and they work very well.
My own projects are heavy on the video side, so I also use Final Cut for creating that content, but I got by for years quite happily just using iMovie. It's the ease with which I can combine video clips, regular page layout, and clickable links to online and on-disk content that got me interested, and I've been using InDesign and Acrobat for exactly that since the very first version of the Creative Suite appeared.
Previously.
posted by dpcoffin at 11:15 AM on September 21, 2010
I produce CD- and DVD-ROMS using the Adobe Creative Suite to create rich-media pdfs which require Adobe Reader to view, since no other pdf viewers will play embedded videos/audio or Flash, AFAIK.
The current version of InDesign (CS5) is replete with features for adding interactivity and rich media to your documents, then exporting to either pdf or Flash, and Acrobat now allows the inclusion of Flash projects inside pdfs, so that would be my recommendation. I've never seen anything that comes close to exploiting all the potential of the rich-media pdf, or any interactive feature that couldn't be reasonably duplicated within a pdf viewed in Reader.
Granted, that's mostly because I haven't seen much evidence that many people are actively trying to exploit the rich-media pdf, and because I don't really know where to look for such evidence. But the tools are definitely there, and they work very well.
My own projects are heavy on the video side, so I also use Final Cut for creating that content, but I got by for years quite happily just using iMovie. It's the ease with which I can combine video clips, regular page layout, and clickable links to online and on-disk content that got me interested, and I've been using InDesign and Acrobat for exactly that since the very first version of the Creative Suite appeared.
Previously.
posted by dpcoffin at 11:15 AM on September 21, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
If that's the case, although there may be better and more elegant solutions, if it were up to me, I'd probably do it all in HTML+JS or HTML+Flash, using one of the many templates that are floating around. (E.g. S5 or HTML Slidey.) Neither of those are WYSIWYG, but they're both very flexible and let you embed any sort of web content into your "slides". To launch, the user would just need to click on an index.html file on the CD. (Which you could probably set up to autorun on Windows, although I think autorun is a dangerous misfeature and its use should be discouraged.)
If you were really concerned about making the disc self-contained, you could configure Firefox Standalone with the presentation as the start page, and burn that too. One way to test this out might be to dummy everything up on a Flash thumbdrive and then use your CD burning program to just copy the thumbdrive to a CD.
If you don't want to author the slides in HTML, there are some Powerpoint to HTML or Powerpoint to Flash converters that would probably work, although I wonder how well they cope with more complex PP features. (I used one a while back and it was fine, but the presentation was a very simple series-of-bulletpoints thing.)
But in general the whole multimedia-disc concept seems to have gone out of fashion, and the last few I got were just really rich web sites burned to disc.
Actual DVD-Video discs, which are mostly video clips but can have a fairly rich menu structure, are still popular though. But the only creation tools I've used are iDVD (okay if you're willing to use one of their templates) and DVD Studio Pro (learning curve like the North Slope of Everest, staggeringly expensive). I'm sure there are some intermediate tools around, but you are basically limited to video and slideshows due to the nature of the medium.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:39 AM on September 21, 2010