Multimedia:Overview:Software

Media creation
To develop multimedia requires specialised software for
 * Text
 * Graphics
 * Animation
 * Sound and
 * Video

Text
Text can be created in many applications;
 * Basic text editing
 * Windows notepad - an ASCII text editor
 * Notepad++, a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.(NotePad++, n.d.)
 * Wordprocesssors (MS-Word, OpenOffice, Libre Office) and
 * Web editors (Microsoft Expression Web, Adobe Dreamweaver).

Most authoring tools have the ability to enter text and apply a font(eg. Arial, Times) and style (eg. bold, italic).

In a web page text is created in a basic form and a Cascading Style sheet is used to apply the features.

Text can also be created as a graphic. This is important when for example a company requires a certain font to be used for its logo and it would not normally be expected to be available on a users computer.

Graphics
Graphics programs can be divided into bitmap editors and vector drawing editors

Bitmap editors

 * General drawing programs
 * JASC PaintShop Pro
 * Corel PhotoPaint
 * Macromedia Fireworks
 * Specialist editors
 * ArtRage: free (NZ) paint program simulating painting on canvas. http://www.ambientdesign.com

Vector editors

 * Corel Draw
 * Macromedia Fireworks
 * Flash - while much more than a vector drawing tool, it is capable of very sophisticated vector based graphics
 * Open Office / Libre Office Draw

Online albums

 * Flickr
 * Google Picassa
 * Photobucket

Animation

 * Gif Animators
 * Jasc Animation Shop (Comes with Paintshop Pro)
 * Vector animators
 * Flash (and the clones, 3DFX, Swish)
 * Morphing programs
 * HiJack Morph (very old doesnt run on modern machines)
 * 3D Virtual reality
 * Quicktime VR (Corel Photopaint)
 * Blender (n.d.) Home. Retrieved March 08, 2008 from http://www.blender.org/ . Free open source 3D content creation suite
 * Specialised
 * Lip animation - Crazy Talk - http://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk/

Sound

 * Examples
 * Waveform (wav, mp3)
 * Audacity (n.d.) The Open Source, Cross-Platform Sound Editor. Retrieved May 14, 2007 from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
 * Allows multichannel editing
 * Windows Sound Recorder
 * Restricted to 60 seconds of sound capture
 * Adobe Audition (formerly CoolEdit 2000)
 * Video (sound channel only)
 * Windows Movie Maker (able to save to wma)
 * Quicktime (mov)
 * Midi
 * Cubase
 * Finale
 * Sibaleaus
 * Other
 * Musescore

Video

 * Open Source/Free
 * MediaCoder (http://www.mediacoderhq.com/)
 * MediaCoder is a free universal media transcoder since 2005. It integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools in an elegant and transparent manner into an all-in-one transcoding solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, latest codecs and tools are updated added in constantly. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time (includes mov if quicktime installed).
 * Virtual Dub ( http://www.virtualdub.org/ )
 * video capture/processing utility for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.  It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters
 * Light weight
 * Windows
 * Windows Movie Maker (Only creates wmv and wma files
 * Apple QuickTime Pro
 * Google Picasa 3
 * Reasonably priced
 * http://www.avs4you.com
 * AShampoo
 * Heavy weight
 * Adobe Premier
 * Lists
 * http://google2.software.informer.com/download-google-video-editor/

Multimedia application development
There are a wide range of tools that can be used to develop multimedia applications

Basic

 * PowerPoint
 * Google Presentation (part of the Google Docs cloud family)
 * Open Office / Libre Office Impress

Intermediate

 * Adobe Flash with Action Script 2.0
 * Web specific
 * Adobe Dreamweaver
 * Microsoft Expression Web
 * ePublishing
 * Kindle development from Amazon (ePub/Mobi, aws)
 * Adobe Indesign (with extensions)

Advanced (Programming)

 * Microsoft Visual Studio (A programming environment, programming language usually C#)
 * Adobe Director (originally designed for CD-ROM, latest version includes 3D support)
 * Adobe Flash with Action Script 3.0
 * Mobile device/Phone developments kits (Android, iPhone)
 * Java
 * Web applications (Dreamweaver, Expression Web) plus JavaScript, CSS and HTML 5

Tools are used to combine the multimedia elements. These can include tools designed for Hard Disk, CD-ROM / DVD and/or Internet.
 * Examples;
 * Adobe
 * Director (CD-ROM)
 * Flash (Web Animation)
 * Dreamweaver (Web)
 * Microsoft
 * Expression Web (Formerly Frontpage) (Web)
 * PowerPoint (Hard Disk/Memory Stick)
 * Visual Basic (Web/Hard Disk/CD-ROM)

Multifunction Media Converter
Format Factory is a multifunction, free media converter that provides the functions below:
 * All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.
 * All to MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV.
 * All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA.
 * Rip DVD to video file, Rip Music CD to audio file.
 * MP4 files support iPod/iPhone/PSP/BlackBerry format.
 * Supports RMVB,Watermark, AV Mux.

Format Factory's Features: Supports 56 languages
 * 1) support converting all popular video,audio,picture formats to others.
 * 2) Repair damaged video and audio file.
 * 3) Reducing Multimedia file size.
 * 4) Support iphone,ipod multimedia file formats.
 * 5) Picture converting supports Zoom,Rotate/Flip,tags.
 * 6) DVD Ripper.

1 Sep 2011: Whiteboard