Determining Available Technology/Skill Sets
The technology with which you choose to deliver your instruction should complement the instruc- tional goals and audience profiles that were de- fined in the first section. This guide focuses on the use of streaming media (using Real® media delivery tools) to deliver audio, video, animation and
If you are using this guide to prepare your tuto- rial, you need to have some basic knowledge of:
•SMIL (an
•audio recording
•image manipulation (Fireworks®, Photoshop®, etc.)
•Real® media formats
RealText files that will synchronize the audio and visual components of the finished tutorial.
something about optimizing them. Optimizing images allows you to reduce file sizes with as little image degradation as possible.
If you wish to use video in your tutorial, the obvi- ous requirements are a video camera and video editing application. In addition, you will need to become familiar with the options for synchroniz- ing your audio and video segments as well as optimizing video files for streaming in Real me- dia format.
For screen capture video, the product Camtasia is one of the only products on the market and can be found through www.realnetworks.com.
Flash animations can be played in RealPlayer 7 or 8 and the RealOne Player, although sound effects embedded in the Flash animation itself will not be heard. Instead, sound must be syn- chronized using SMIL. Flash animations can
Optionally, you may wish to use video or ani- | The audio for your tutorial will need to be |
mation, in which case you’ll need to be familiar | |
with: | digitally recorded and saved in the appropriate |
• digital video editing | Real format. This process requires a computer |
• video screen capture | equipped with a sound card, |
(Camtasia®) | phone and software for recording and editing |
• Flash® animation production | the audio files. An inexpensive option for audio |
| software is the RealSystem Producer Basic, |
Software/Hardware Requirements | which is freely downloadable (as of summer |
Many of the files required to produce your tutori- | 2002) at www.realnetworks.com. |
al can be created using a variety of applications | Image manipulation can be done using a vari- |
that are available at little or no cost. | |
| ety of applications including the |
A basic text editor like WordPad or Notepad can | Photoshop and Fireworks. In addition to being |
be used to create all of the SMIL, RealPix and | able to create the images, you’ll want to know |
be created using either Macromedia Flash or Adobe LiveMotion.
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