* Media Mixer from Biznews24 for multimedia composition
I just got my hands on a new Web authoring tool called Media Mixer from Biznews24, which describes itself as an “Internet-based business communications” company.
Media Mixer is a multimedia composition for building interactive presentations and Web pages. It allows you to use any Web and graphic design elements for the integration of graphics, audio, video, animation, text and HTML content. Supported content formats include: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and Macromedia Flash MX.
Media Mixer includes what the company calls a “universal publishing module” that automatically publishes content for many different media formats and browsers. This provides integration of multiple screen resolutions, connections and languages.
Installation was fast and straightforward and the program loads quickly. (I’ve noticed that many other composition programs are really slow to load.)
The Media Mixer interface uses drag and drop to allow you to add content to the time line and to the Presentation panel in a fairly intuitive way. You can then position, edit and otherwise manipulate elements as you please.
In the time line you can set key frames for objects as well as the duration of an object’s visibility. You can also synchronize with video and audio media elements. The output is pure HTML, DHTML and JavaScript except for the plug-ins required for specific types of media playback.
The potential of this product is terrific although I found a couple of areas that arguably need polishing – for example, I wanted to have a graphic move smoothly around the page but found after digging through the documentation that smooth motion is only supported for cursors.
When I looked for cursors in the documentation there was only one entry listed for page 3-24 but nothing on that page referred to cursors. Such is the nature of a 1.0 release. Even so, I think this product has the potential to become a market leader.
Media Mixer is perhaps a little expensively priced at $1,495 per seat although it is arguably unique in its feature set.
