FLASH works very well for CD's as well. One other product to look at is Opus from www.digitalworkshop.com. The learning curve is very shallow for it.

K

http://www.composerseries.com/ check this out, maybe exactly what your looking for.

Looked at that and while it looks very easy to use the sample they gave me is way beyond what it'll do, this thing has animated flash grahics matched to music and VOs, embedded videos, embedded PDF files that are click to print etc.
I think if I do leap into this thing it'd have to be Director, with Vegas to do the video / audio portions. Lots to consider here, and of course they want to know how much it'll cost to do 'something like that', don't you love those detailed specifications.
Bob.

Well,

As a 6 years professionnal user of Director, i would like to point to a couple of things:

1. Director is unquestionably the most used soft for interactive (and hybrid!) CD-Roms. The only (somewhat) comparable tool i know of is probably Revolution (altough it isn't really easier to learn) . If you are inclined to object oriented, drag and drop and no coding style authoring app., you may have a look to IShell (http://www.tribeworks.com). It certainely has some appeal, but when i checked it some years ago, it was entirely dependant of Quick time player installation and had questionnable stability.

Director has indeed a very steep learning curve if you want to do anything advanced and professionnal. Don't even believe to learn it and being productive for a specific project, you'l eat your socks... (Interactive multimedia production is not a trivial business with any tools BTW) Don't also beleive you can build anything advanced and professionnal just with premade scripts drag and drop. You'l have to learn the Lingo programming scripting langage for this.

The reason why it is heavy to learn is not related to a bad conception but is due to it's immense power, flexibility and expandability. IMO, it also produce the most stable and robust interactive multimedia applications.

2. Flash *can* indeed be used for CD-Rom but it is far from being the best tool for it:
a. It does not support native video formats (you'l have to convert everything in proprietary, less than optimal for CD-Rom format).
b. It is seriously flawed in term of CD-Rom streaming management (you'l get zillion problems make it work reliably if your project is heavy in term of media assets access)
c.It is far less powerfull in term of features ad not necessarely easier to use than Director for complex projects.

Hope this help...

If you don't need the Mac compatability go with Multimedia Builder. Just as powerful as director but a LOT cheaper and easier to work with in my opinion.

Bob, you might want to talk with Victor Milt about this. He uses Director a lot and would be a great source of information for you.

I have also used MMB with great success authoring multimedia CDs. It has very powerful scripting capabilities and the interface is quite intuiitive. The learning curve is not very steep and you can't beat the cost.
Cheers,
Tom

MMB is a great program that will do just about anything you can imagine.
There is a great user group forum as well so if you do run into a snag there are plenty of helping hands.
Windows only as stated before.
www.mediachance.com

Another great thing about Multimedia Builder...you NEVER pay for updates. Once you buy it..that's it, you never have to spend another penny to get the latest version.

Don't want to confuse the issue, but I've been using Mediator Pro ( www.matchware.net ) for several years to produce interactive CDRoms and various other things including websites.

It is mostly drag and drop, and includes incredibly sophisticated programming beneath a simple interface. I use Vegas to output MPEG1 or wmv to include on CDs, and to record Voice Overs which can be synched to animated pages.

I put out a 256 screen CD on Nutrition, which included the ability to be completely navigated using a single switch, for kids with disabilities.

It has the option to output a whole project as Flash or incorporate Flash as part of a CD .

(Oh, and It's PC only.)

Guys,
thanks SO much for all the input. I'll have a look into all these suggestions. I do fully appreciate why doing this kind of task isn't a piece of cake but I'm pretty conversant with OOP so learning Lingo shouldn't be too much of a brain strain.
But I think this highlights one of the issues we all face today. You have an existing client who you make good money out of and they ask for something from the left field. You can turn your back on it and send them off to a specialist but then discover that guy ALSO edits vide/authors DVDs etc so goodbye client.
Bob.

Bob, that's why I learnt authoring - I had a project a few years back and was going to have to subcontract it to someone using Macromedia but she was so expensive she was going to eat up all my profit, and was also going to have direct contact with my client. Fortuitously, I met someone who used Mediator and had time to learn the basics ... and haven't looked back.

I've now done dozens of projects, some CD Rom only, others done in multi formats - VHS, DVD and CDRom.

Good luck whichever way you go.
Peter