Multimedia

The book I read to research this post was the Diploma in Digital Applications D202 Multimedia Exam Guide by Janet Snell et al which is a very good book that I bought at a car boot sale. This book is about 200 pages so is a reasonable length and is an exam guide to the DiDA module in multimedia. The exam comes in 2 forms a certicate where you pass a foundation module and another module and a diploma where you pass all 4 modules. In a lot of these kind of exams you create an e-portfolio which is essentially a website with links to your work which is essentially a contents page with everything linked. This book was published in 2005 so is a bit dated and still uses Microsoft Frontpage  for doing the site but I had for a very cheap price. It also uses Audacity for digital audio and Windows Movie Maker for digital video. There is a lot of general information about constructing a website, Frontpage will create thumbnails of your photos automatically when you import them. Actually this kind of automation in Frontpage proved its undoing as it used to make changes to your code which would upset many programmers no end. When importing video into Movie Maker you must make sure you don’t exceed the specified file size. When you construct everything you do should add something useful to the site and help the user. Many things like pretty patterns on the page detract from this. The text should be easy to read and large enough and you should only use popular fonts as if it isn’t installed on their computer an alternative font will be used to view it by default which could ruin the effect. I just bought this book because I thought it would be an interesting computing book. As I did say it is rather dated so probably just mildly interesting to read.