Multimedia is nothing new. The nature of human communication has always involved “multimedia”. We hear, speak, write, draw, make gestures, play music, and act out our thoughts and feelings to one another. We have enjoyed multimedia presentations since our childhood through film, television, and, more recently, videotape, videodisc and digital videodisc. These have all involved analog media. What makes recent developments in multimedia new and exciting is that we can now deal with these various media in a digital format.The digital format allows manipulation, sharing, and merging of data in ways that analog cannot. For example, writers can incorporate digital images into a word processing document. They can record and edit sounds to link with images or text, permitting the data types to serve multiple purposes with a minimum of reworking. Users can program the computer to seek files randomly, to store these different files digitally, just as any computer file. They can edit this information, eliminating unnecessary parts, transforming them, or adding alternative data or special effects – all without expensive postproduction.1.1What is Multimedia?Multimedia evokes different images depending on the listener or reader’s understanding. Multimedia is defined as an interactive computer-mediated presentation that includes at least two of the following elements: text, sound, still graphic images, motion graphics, and animation (Theoretical Foundations of Multimedia. Robert S. Tannenbaum (c. 1998)). Even the unabridged edition of The World Book Dictionary (c. 1990) leaves room for interpretation by defining the term as “using a combination of various media”. 1.1.1Mixed ModeSome people understand “multimedia” to mean the use of two or more types of media in the same product. We know that CD-ROMS (Compact Disc-Read Only Memory) can store virtually any type of digitised information. If ...
