Presentation Question

I am not really sure if this falls into the Flash category or not, but for all you Flash gurus out there, maybe you can give me some insight on if Flash can perform this function...

I want to distribute a media CD for my web design company. This CD would just autorun a presentation which gives the potential customers an overview on our policies, pricing, etc.

What are some of the options I have to design this presentation? I already have the hard copy information that we send out to potential customers, I basically want to add it to a CD for some extra glitz. I also figured that burning one CD would be cheaper than printing out 35-40 pages of dull black and white text.

I was thinking that Flash would be a good tool to design this presentation in, and I was also looking into seeing if PowerPoint can do anything like this.

Any suggestions would help...
-Sam

Here is my super opinionated view on your question...
For what you wanna do it may be a better choice to go for Macromedia Director. It's original purpose was for creating CD-Roms, Presentations, Kiosks, etc. However I rarely use director because: It is $700 more expensive than Flash (Yeah, they sell it too...), it's got a steeper learning curve than Flash, even though "the experts" love it's interface, it's quite cumbersome unless you have three monitors, and finally most of the projects you produce with it will never look as good as a piece done in Flash. That's all opinion (except for the price)
As for producing cd-roms this is the problem i ran into: if your target audience is only PC...you can get your material together and burn it yourself or take it to some vendor with little trouble. but if you want it to be both pc and mac compatible than burning yourself could be a pain (burning yourself could be a pain, hahaha), and even some vendors don't have the right stuff for making discs mac-compatible...for home solutions, you gotta produce two versions of your .dcr or .exe file (just a config change, no biggy), you need to create an AUTORUN file (i saw a tutorial for this somewhere on the net (macromedia.com or webmonkey.com???), then you need burning software that can burn in a way that macs can "see"...which i never got around too (EZCD and Nero fail this i think)

Don't know if that helps ya...rob

btw: should this forum be renamed to "Shockwave"? because i easily have more Director questions than Flash...

I agree with rob in his statements about Director. I've used both Flash and Director for presentations, and the learning curve for Flash is not quite nearly as steep as for Director. To be completely honest, Director is really made for a different kind of presentation than Flash is suited to create: Director works better when using lots of different types of media, whereas Flash is better for text and vector graphics.

As for Powerpoint, it's very limited in it's capabilities, unless all you want to do is display bulleted text with clipart. So, unless you plan to do a simple slide presentation, don't go with PowerPoint.

And as to the concern over platform-compatibility for CDs, I'm pretty sure most of the more recent MacOSs can read WinPC CD-Roms, as none of the ones I've used recently have had any of those problems.

I also agree with the guys above, but i think Director has a huge learning curve if you are targeting a rather smallish presentation.

For what you want to do i recomend Flash. But flash has no templates like in Powerpoint so it might take longer to finish, but Flash looks way cooler, if you do it with love (and discretion)...

Thats what i would do anyway ...

Tutorial on the creating autorun CDs can be found here URL

You can make hybrid CDs quite easily in the roxio toast titanium (making executables for both, but "shared content" when it comes to the rest.)

I don't know if you can burn hybrid cds on roxios ez creator - but perhaps you can - it is a lot different than the mac version.

I *think* you would want to do something like change your properties to ISO 9660 so file names work better on a Mac. I have had no troubles moving from a PC to a mac with data CDs (although my pc names look weird on a mac)... but some problems moving with mac cds>PC.

Good luck.

in general, don´t use special characters in your file names. don´t use more than 32 characters, better stick to the "old MS-DOS" scheme 8.3 for maximum compatibility, better don´t use spaces.
- hey, it´s only filenames, noone is supposed to know what they are for but you, the programmer!

Hey, that's right! =)