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Seven, you mention going over to www.hash.com/amtutes for additional tutorials. Are these video tutorials also or a mix of video and print tutorials?

Contacted 3DFA and they were very nice people. They didn't have too much to say about the tutorials area except to become active on the forums and I would probable find people there to answer my questions and help me along. They recommended that I use the demo first and see if I like it. So I was impressed that they didn't try to sell it to me first and answer questions later. I did get an offer form e-frontier (Curious Labs) by e-mail. Apparently, till the end of July you can get their Motion Artist (Flash Maker) for $29 (reg. $49). I don't know what the difference in power is though. They claim that it oursell Macromedia Flash in Japan.

I guess I was a little too quick to say the QuickStart didn't impress me. When I went to disk two I realized that disk one wasn't finished there were still two more video tutorials to go. Now I must say that I would highly recommend the QuickStart CD's. Very good work afterall.

I purchased the Quick Start and I wasn't that impressed. I wondered if this was any better. I like the videos too so I guess I'll save the money and stick with the free videos.

I can assume that this "users group" is no longer active. I am pretty new to Animation Master but if you live in the Los Angeles Area, and there are enough of us, we could restart a Los Angeles Animation Master Users Group. For those of you interested....post a message here.

I have the Los Angeles Lightwave Users Group who meet regularly by Dodger stadium next to the Los Angeles River.

That company was bought by Macromedia. Macromedia still sell RoboHelp but RoboDemo is now called Captivate. And of course, Macromedia just recently got acquired by Adobe so who knows.

I like it. It looks really cool. The only problem I usually find with these programs is that if you are really really sharp you can use it but if your not familiar with their competition you will have a heck of a time trying to figure out how to use it. Don't get me wrong. Flash is hard but there are so many step-by-step books out there and video training material that if you want to put in the time you can master it. I wish there was this kind of knowledge base and commitment for these programs. I went on their website and notice the volume of people asking how to do the features stated in the program. This tells me the documentation and tutorials that come with it is severely lacking. Several years ago I bought an Authorware program, MediaForge, which was very powerful and expensive but I got a great deal on it and the others were very expensive ( Adobe Authorware). So I bought it thinking that I could now develop programs without having to know programming. The reason why you buy Authorware. Well it may have been powerful but it came with one short tutorial which covered almost nothing, no examples, the manual and the disks. Here you figure it out. Needless to say it has sat on the shelve and it taught me a lesson. Pay the money for the big boys program and buy the training material. It may seem like it is costing you a lot more but your time is worth something and it will pay for itself in no time.

Its the actionscript learning curve that I'm trying to avoid. I looked at Live Stage Pro and they say no programing required. Yeah, but a heck of a lot of scripting. I'm just trying to learn JavaScript now for Adobe Acrobat. I think I figured out a way to accomplish what I want in Acrobat but I will need to test out my ideas. The big problem with PDF document creation for multimedia is that Adobe doesn't let you have control over the controls. So if I don't want someone to go to the next page till they do something on the page; if they know the command they can bypass my path just by clicking on any open area. A hugh downside. Adobe should provide a command, such as the security commands built in, that will block external commands and make only commands contained within the document active.

Great! I really need some good tutorials.

Thanks, I'll have a look at those tonight.

I believe TechSmith's Camtasia Studio allows this type of interaction but it isn't cheep either. Adobe Captivate is just downright expensive. I believe that you can produce this type of interactive training with QuickTime using LiveStage Pro but it is way too expensive. Right now I use Adobe Acrobat to produce my interactive PDF training. I guess what I need to do now is to figure out how to combine WINK or CamStudio with Acrobat. The good thing is that starting with Acrobat 6 you can embed movies and sound so you don't need separate movie and PDF tutorial files. Some software companies now provide tutorial movies as part of their PDF documentation. So you can read about how to do this, then click on movie icon and see it being done.

Do you have an active link for Infanview? The one on the tutorial page is inactive. Is this software still being supported?

There are Free screen recording software such as WINK and CamStudio but are there any Free software that will allow you to take that and build interactive tutorials? I'm sure you have used one of them. That's where they show you how to do something and then they tell you to do it. Or there is a pop-up dialogue box that tells you to select this on screen and when you do another dialogue box comes up and says "good." Interactive where the user needs to select something beside the "next" button. WINK Download CamStudio Download

Thanks for letting us know about WINK. Another program that is similar and still Freeware is CamStudio 2.0 CamStudio 2.0 Download