One of the more involved and time-consuming aspects of multimedia product development is gathering all of the text, sound, and image data you plan to use in your product. Animations, images, text, and sound must be digitized from various sources, edited, and eventually converted to the final storage and presentation formats required by Windows with Multimedia.
The cost for data preparation tools, systems, and labor is significant. Digitizing and editing the data for your application are time-consuming and costly aspects of product development. For example, to digitize, convert, touch up, and crop a single image can take from several minutes to an hour. Scripting, recording, mixing, and editing a few minutes of sound can be as demanding. Consequently, you'll want to always be looking for tools and methods that allow you to automate and improve the production process. Your efficiency in this process directly affects the overall cost of development.
One key point to always consider: plan for the future. You should always prepare data for a title with the objective of recycling it within other titles. Spreading the data preparation costs across multiple titles is simply a smart way to maximize your return on investment. Look for ways to use the same information in different products—for instance, a multimedia encyclopedia and a series of educational titles.
Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 in this book describe some of the issues associated with preparing five basic types of multimedia data resources—images, audio, MIDI, text, and animation. Each chapter presents an overview of the processes involved.
Caution:
Never digitize music from professional recordings, or images from magazines, books, movies, or other recording media if you plan to use these resources in your final product—most are protected by copyright. If you find something that you must have, ask permission to use it or you will be violating copyright law. The “Multimedia Producer's Legal Survival Guide,” by Stephen Ian McIntosh, is a good source available on this subject.