Movies on the CD-ROM: How to Play Them and Use Them

The movies on the CD-ROM were created with Camtasia from Techsmith. With this utility, users can capture movies from a computer desktop with perfect fidelity and simultaneously record audio. To help you understand offscreen actions, left mouse clicks are designated with a blue circle emanating from the pointer, and right mouse clicks show up as red circles. Unfortunately for Maya, the middle mouse click is not circled, but verbal cues for the middle mouse button have been added. Camtasia also overdubs noises of key clicks and mouse clicks to clue you in to what's going on. You can easily shuttle these movies forward or backward if you want to replay difficult parts or skip sections you've already learned. Nearly every chapter in the book has supporting movies that are worth exploring, totaling several hours of direct instruction.

To make these movies multiplatform, they have been recompressed into WMV format, a streaming media format that plays with Windows Media Player. The Windows Media Player is available for PC, Macintosh, and Sun Solaris. The WMV screen codec is very clean and compresses tightly for the maximum amount of recording time in a fixed storage space. The full 800x600 capture is crisp and clear, and the audio is distinct. If the movies are noisy or inaudible, check your system for speaker power, connection, speaker volume, and desktop volume. Right-click the speaker icon in Windows so that you can adjust overall volume and wave output volume. Distortion could occur in the audio if the computer volume is set too high, but the amplified speakers' volume knob is set too low. Adjust both to a moderate level for the best results.

Because the video plays back at 800x600 resolution, you need to set your desktop resolution to 1024x768 or larger so that you have access to the Media Player controls placed below the movie. If you must view them at 800x600 or smaller (as with laptops), set your player to resize the movie player to 50%. You'll get some image degradation, but you'll still be able to view the movie. After playback starts in Media Player, toggle the full-screen mode.

If you get errors such as "invalid file type" when attempting to play the movies, you simply need to download the latest Media Player version from Microsoft. Point your web browser to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/ and download the player for your operating system.

You might also want to check this book's web site (see "This Book's Web Site and Author Contact Information" later in this introduction) for other tips on movie playback and new free movies for you to download: http://www.mayafundamentals.com/.