ProActive Productions CRE:8 Multimedia

Business card envy is just one of the many work-related conditions to affect the white collar professional. The quest for the crispest card is never ending and print shop professionals are constantly experimenting with new, exciting paper textures and ways to create blacker-than-black inks.

But this is the 21st century and paper is passé. The business people of the future no longer swap bits of cardboard when they meet, they exchange personal CDRoms.

At least that's what ProActive Productions would have us believe, judging by its CRE:8 Multimedia package. £116 buys you everything you need to create your own credit card multimedia CD-R: software, 10 blank discs, labelling software and even sticky labels. Extra discs cost around £1.20 each.

Credit card CD-Rs only hold 30Mb of data (stored in a circle at the centre of the rectangular 'disc') but this is plenty for a multimedia presentation.

The CRE:8 software doesn't come with a manual but there is an animated tutorial. You shouldn't need it anyway as the software is extremely easy to use. The presentation's main menu is shown as a small preview and its contents are shown separately.

Tick a box to turn on a menu, type in a name, double-click a slide to edit it and you can then choose between six layouts for the text and accompanying 'media element'. These elements can be images, videos or Flash animations but music (in the form of a WAV file) can only be attached to the main menu and it then plays throughout.

You can also choose between five main menu layouts and alter the font and colour of the text. The range of customisation is pretty limited but then this is supposed to be a simple tool that anyone can use and not a multimedia creation application for experts.

With the presentation complete, all that remains is to export the files and you'll then need to write them to a CD-R (credit card or otherwise) using your own software. One neat touch is that discs play automatically when inserted into a CDRom drive.

Contact: ProActive Productions 01932 221199 www.proact.co.uk

Also consider: Microsoft PowerPoint
A full-blown presentation package that can create standalone presentations. £420 (upgrade £199) as part of Microsoft Office XP. Worth it. Computeractive issue 87.