Operation Manual

Working with Graphics, Animation, and Multimedia 55
Multimedia
Considering all the cautionary advice here about reducing file sizes to
achieve acceptable load time on home-based Web browsers, a foray
into multimedia is clearly not for the faint of heart! Although WebPlus
8.0 allows you to insert both audio and video files—and will even
embed the files in the original publication to facilitate your efforts—
from a design standpoint this feature should be regarded as rather
experimental.
Although WebPlus will insert a wide variety of audio and video files
(such as QuickTime, MPEG, RealAudio, and RealVideo), unless you
know your target visitors can play one of the special formats you
should stick with the “generic” Windows media types. These include
.WAV for audio and .AVI for video. The main barrier, of as with
graphics, is file size. Typically, a .WAV file for speech content
consumes about 10K per second, and a compressed .AVI file for a
postage-stamp-sized, 10 frame-per-second movie video without sound
uses at least 35K per second. If you want an audio track along with
your movie, add the two numbers together. While these rates are paltry
when the source is a local hard disk, over a standard modem (using our
earlier estimate of 3-5K per second, and we’ll let you do the math) your
Web visitors will have a painfully long wait before that five-second
video clip knocks their socks off. And unless you opt for streaming
media, which entails technical issues well beyond this chapter, there’s
just no other choice.
Another obvious barrier to using audio or video is obtaining or
producing the content. WebPlus, of course, doesn’t handle either
format natively—it cannot edit or play them back—so unless you rely
on borrowed or clip media, you’ll have to master a media editing
application or know someone who can. (Any teenagers in the family?)
The good news is that just because multimedia capabilities are
“experimental” in WebPlus doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of fun
experimenting! If you (and/or your Web visitors) are on a local network
or have extremely fast Internet access, the fact that audio and video are
basically file downloads should not be a barrier. The limited support
that WebPlus offers may be exactly what you need to include that
special bit of digitized home movie footage, or some background theme
music that loops while visitors peruse your home page.