HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE NEEDS FOR MULTIMEDIA

    If you're one of those few people left, scattered here and there, who aren't interested in making your own video clips or downloading the latest MP3 files for that perfect digital sound, then consider yourself lucky. Instead of using your computer for multimedia, you are using it for monomedia, meat-and-potatoes everyday activities like word processing, crunching e-mail, cruising the Web, or balancing finances. You can buy all you need -- a Pentium II, III, or Celeron 750Mhz or 800Mhz computer -- for as little as $350. 

    But if you are intrigued by digital video/audio and Microsoft's power-hungry Windows XP, you'll need the beefy circuitry of a new multimedia PC. Digital photography, home movies, and MP3 music all have horsepower requirements all their own. By focusing on what you need, you can obtain a fairly good multimedia system for less than $999.

    Things that were once bells and whistles have become essentials. First, consider a CD burner (that is, a CD-RW drive), which you can use for backing up data onto blank CD's or for carrying around 650 megabytes of files at a time. When you consider that blank CD's cost about 25 cents each (one in every spindle is usually bad) and can be played back on almost any computer on earth, floppy diskettes (which hold 1.4 megabytes each) and Zip disks (which cost $10 each, hold 250 megabytes or less and require a Zip drive to play back) suddenly look like relics.

    Next, consider a clock speed of 2.0-gigahertz or higher, a hard drive bigger than 40 GB, a monitor larger than 15-inch, a color printer, a scanner, and a digital camera.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY - Today's computers have "digital camera" written all over them. Just plugging your camera into a computer equipped with Windows XP or Mac OSX triggers the photo-transfer process. Once your digital photos are on the computer, another couple of clicks turns them into Web pages or scaled-down images suitable for printing or attaching to e-mail.

    But digital cameras have an electronic hunger all their own. You'll need extra memory: 256 megabytes is a nice number that adds less than $80 to the standard 128-megabyte installation. Here, too, a CD burner for archiving, backing up and distributing your photos is extremely handy.

    So too is a good injket photo printer. Try to find one with a six-color ink cartridge.  They print amazing colorfast photos and transparencies.

WEB-PAGE DESIGN - Even a basic machine offers enough power for building Web sites as long as you have given it some memory breathing room — 256 megabytes, for example. A big monitor can show more than one Web page at once while you work, and a flat-panel screen will be easier to stare at for hours at a time.

DIGITAL MUSIC AND VIDEO - MP3 files are big, often 5 or 10 megabytes per song. Digital video files can easily run as large as 1 GB apiece. Your first consideration, then, should be a very big hard drive, the more gigabytes, the better, 60 or 80 GB, if you can get it. Your next thought should be signing up for a cable modem or D.S.L. service. Otherwise, you will be condemned to downloading songs over a dial-up modem.

    Finally, you need some means of listening to the output of your computer system. Throw away those cheap tin cup speakers that come with PC's. If you've never heard a three-piece subwoofer sound system, or even a five-piece surround sound system, then you don't know what you're missing. 

VIDEO EDITING - Digital video consumes even more disk space than music — about 13 gigabytes per hour of footage. Again, get a very, very big hard drive.

    If you have a choice, get a Macintosh. Every model comes complete with the camcorder-input jack you need (called FireWire, iLink or 1394 by various manufacturers) and an elegant video-editing program such as iMovie 2.

    If you're buying a Windows PC, you will need to equip it with a FireWire card (about $50) and software (MGI's VideoWave 4, for example, about $100, or Adobe Premiere, about $400). Other video-editing bundles exist, but Adobe products are hard to beat.  

ADOBE PRODUCTS - Adobe is a household name when it comes to creating any video or print project. Photoshop and Illustrator are great for web image creation. After Effects and Premiere are also great programs. After Effects, as its name suggests, is used for post-production or effect creation with video. It includes many features that are indispensable, such as color keying (green-screening) and the ability to import a variety of image/video formats complete with an alpha mask (a channel that tells where the image is transparent). The timeline is across the bottom and shows your clips and their in/out points, and can have their blending mode changed a la Photoshop.

    Premiere is also for video, but is generally used for DV import and export, whereas After Effects is used for the heftier effects. Premiere is the king at its price range, and is fairly simple to use. Video-editing files get really large, especially when uncompressed (I average about 1GB per minute depending on the number of effects). Photoshop is the ultimate king of the hill - no one can compete with it for all of its functions. Photoshop can do anything with an image, and while it may seem overly complex at first, once you have played with it for a while you get the hang of it, and can customize the layout. 

    Finally, there is Illustrator, a superb vector creation program. Vector creation means that any image you create in illustrator can be scaled infinitely large with no degradation of image quality. This is accomplished by using math and vectors instead of pixels. Illustrator is great for creating an animated look and can create depth with ease thanks to gradient mesh tool. Again the program is deep, so allow time to learn all the ins and outs. The documentation that comes with these programs is good, but you may want to buy extra books to help get to grasp some of the harder effects. Also if you want to get your work done quicker invest some time in memorizing the keyboard shortcuts. 

Last updated: 08/27/03