Mediator 5 Pro

Mediator 5 Pro is the latest incarnation of a multimedia-authoring tool that has always had ease of use as its key design philosophy. It's a page-based authoring tool, with your multimedia presentation made up of separate screens. Pages are created by adding objects, such as video clips, and then defining what should happen to them. All objects can be interactive and can respond to a series of events at the same time.

To make objects do something when clicked, you right-click over the object, select Events and the dialog appears. Events are listed down the left side. To choose an event, such as a Mouse Click event, it's dragged into the area to the right. To specify what you want to happen when that event takes place, you drag an action from the tabbed list to a position next to the event. Any number of actions can respond to a single event.

This procedure has remained essentially unchanged throughout Mediator's life, and is the main reason for its unparalleled ease of use. However, in a sense, Mediator 5 Pro is an entirely new product rather than an upgrade. Completely re-coded, it incorporates DirectX functionality and has abandoned support for 16-bit development. This is generally a good thing, but those of us who develop for clients with creaky hardware will have to keep a copy of version 4 handy or use Illuminatus 4 (reviewed issue 46, p196).

Mediator 5 Pro presentations look fantastic when run on a reasonably specified PC: comfortably matching Dazzler (reviewed issue 45, p188), which also uses DirectX, and shaming Director 7 (reviewed issue 54, p184). All effects can be added to individual objects or pages. Many of Mediator's most impressive enhancements are to the visual capabilities of presentations. Take the built-in Shadow and Glow tools, for example, which add effects to either text or graphics without the need to resort to a bitmap editor.

Mediator 5 Pro now supports Alpha Channels - 256-level greyscale images placed on top of a colour graphic, with the grey values in between white and black offering varying levels of transparency. This is often used to soften edges on a square picture, but can also be used for special effects. Bump maps are similar. Again 256-level greyscale images are overlaid on colour graphics to create an embossed look that can be placed on any other object, even a running video clip. The obvious use would be as a navigation button. However, they can't be used in button objects as there's no simple way to make the bump map appear to have been pressed.

Support for panoramic pictures is impressive. Images much larger than the screen can be scrolled around by moving the pointer to the edge of the visible portion. You can even position objects within the picture, but off-screen. One example shows a panoramic image of a room: when you scroll to the left, a TV is revealed with a video clip playing on it.

Animation capabilities have improved. You can now create an animation path using BÚzier curves in any shape, and then assign the path to any object so that the object comes to rest in a specific position. Combine this with support for animated GIFs, and you have the ability to include realistic cel animation in your Mediator presentations.

This sort of power usually means added complexity, but in fact Mediator has been made even easier to use, with a redesigned interface featuring a dockable page list, object list and properties box. Navigating a Mediator presentation is much simpler than in previous versions. Newcomers will also welcome the multimedia catalogue containing backgrounds and buttons and, more usefully, a range of bump maps and alpha effects to get you started. And they'll be more grateful for Wizards to aid the creation of standard presentations, including catalogues, slideshows and simple computer-based training.