MultiMedia Experience - Review

MultiMedia Experience is an Authoring System written by Optonica for multimedia titles development. This tool helps multimedia authors to coordinate their data information, images, sounds, CDXL films and to let them simply and quickly paint interactive interfaces with the final user. Differently from other products, like for example Scala MM, MultiMedia Experience was drawn thinking at production of titles on CD-Rom for Amiga. In fact, from the first page the manual invites to organize the data to move them without problems to the final media. Sadly, the manual isn't very detailed and it has few pages: as always, using a program is the best way to learn it.

MultiMedia Experience's interface is completely different from Commodore Style Guide, but you'll get used to it after a while...even if it seems this program has been written by hackers, not by experienced programmers.

Anyway, the general layout is like many products of this kind Scala or Brilliance: all the editor's tools appear on one screen which opens at our monitor's half, while on its upper side will appear our multimedia application's pages that we'll create.

In MultiMedia Experience every argument has its session of particular options. Lets see some together.

Pages Manipulation

Here the pages are created and manipulated; we can add, delete, test our multimedia pages.

FX Selection

In MultiMedia Experience every page can have a particular video effect.In the version we tested, there were 60 effects, but they were all almost the same, even if they appeared to be interesting and useful. In the image we are showing, you can see some of these effects and an useful "preview" button, which lets us immediately test the effect that we selected.

Requester File

That's the program's real sad note: it is completely out of the standard (everyone uses ReqTools or ASL), it results to be rigid and difficult to use. This is perhaps the worst thing of MultiMedia Experience. After an evening of test, we didn't get used to it...

Conclusions

MultiMedia Experience is a program that mantains its promises. Sometimes it isn't very flexible and you need to get used to it, but working hard you can obtain a good level product.

If your intention is writing multimedia presentation, titles on CD-Rom or handle infopoints (like those you see at the station), MultiMedia Experience can be a product to value with attention.

Distribution

MultiMedia Experience is distributed by C.A.T.M.U. snc. and it costs about Lire 90.000 (US$ 80)

For other information, you can contact: 

C.A.T.M.U. snc
Casella postale 63
10023 Chieri (TO)
Fax: 011 - 941.52.37
Tel: 011 - 941.52.37
email: solotre@mbox.vol.it

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    Written By: Fabio Rotondo      e-mail: fsoft@intercom.it
                C.so Vercelli 9
                28100 Novara
                ITALY               tel:    (ITA) - (0)321 459676

English Translation: Sara Trani