This is the IFRA’s guide to multi-media – you won’t need all this gear, but if you’d
like to see this report, you can get your own .pdf copy here.

You don’t need dedicated A/V technicians, a $5,000 High Definition
video camera and a $10,000 editing suite to do multi-media on the web.
Advances in video and audio technology mean not only is high quality
audio and video well within the reach of most budgets, the skill sets
needed are well within the reach of any interested person.
Heck, as YouTube (and MetaCafe and Blip.tv) proves, these days a 14
year old with the family handycam and home computer can create the kind
of video it used to take a roomful of professionals to produce.
So. What do you need to start producing your own sound and slide shows, podcasts or videos?
Not an awful lot.
A word of caution: These are recommendations. The specific products we
mention aren’t your only choices by any means – you should seek and
take the advice of our IT staff and buyers. The key here is not the
specific product, but the capabilities of each. You can spend an awful
lot more than we’re recommending and get higher quality software and
hardware that gives you more options and abilities and produces a
higher quality product.
But we’re being guided by the "good enough" philosophy of the Newspaper
Next program. (As well as the "fail fast and fail cheap" part of that
philosophy.) If you get the equipment we’re recommending — or similar
products — you’ll be able to get multi-media on the web fairly quickly,
fairly cheaply with the staff on hand — especially if any of them are
WebU grads.
Read the rest of the WebU Guide to Going Digital — Without Going Broke after the jump….
Bill Dunphy

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