CompuServe Thread

I thought I'd start a new thread on this since apparently some share this ironic situation. First off, your points support what we've felt for years about the effectiveness of presentations. I don't think Adesk personnel have had to sit through too many PP presentations. I have seen my share and they are extrememly boring. What's more, when we've had Adesk reps out to do demos of their exciting products, they waste 50% or more time using PP to talk about them. As one attendee put it, GET ON WITH THE GOOD STUFF! 3D Studio and Animaor speak for themselves, and if Adesk needs to get some corporate overview info in there… snaz it up people! Just look at the siggraph company logo's section! People get glued to the 93 video… they can't keep their eyes off of it… so why do we resort to PP and a bunch of bullets? PP relies heavily on externals too, and its tools are very limited. I liked what you said about the recognition of the presentation. When people are thinking "it's a powerpoint presentation" and recognizing fonts and the all too familiar blue gradient backdrop instead of the information being presented, the point has been missed. The tool should not be the thing… the information should. And if the tool is limited in its ability to present the information, the presentation is limited. Powerpoint is just a fancy overhead. It's not a move projector/editor. And again, movies have far more of an emotional appeal than slides do. There is also a future to Animator Pro in that its programable. It has open ended architecture, like so many existing products. You use PP, you're stuck with PP. End of story. For those who say its convenient, well, convenient doesn't sell. And I have personally seen Adesk reps asked by the audience to skip over the PP part and get on with the products. Let me show how deep rooted the psychology of this scenario is. There was this guy who was talking at a seminar about AutoCAD. For years he said AutoCAD was made by AutoCAD (as if AutoCAD was the company itself). It didn't take him even knowing that Autodesk was the company name for him to want to buy AutoCAD or learn more about it. Whoever came up with the idea that end users care about corporate figures and Daratech-type info doesn't know much about end users. 9 out of ten seminar atendees use the package every day. And the sell (if any) comes from seeing a recognizeable program in action. Look at the 3D Studio R3 overview flic… 200 new features. THIS is what sells 3D Studio, not some PP thing bulleting the 200 features as text descriptions. If I say: hey, R3 has a new hilite feature for Omni lights, and I put up a blue gradient with a bullet item to say this, it won't do nearly as much as going into 3ds and demoing it. This effectiveness isn't just for feature sets either. If I want to talk about Adesk (and I've done this quite a bit), I can glue my audience to the screen and what I'm saying by bringing up the morphing jello adesk logo on marble (320×200) and they'll hear everything I'm saying till I go to the next flic. No, I'd say anyone who doesn't think ANI is more powerful than PP in its effectiveness in presentations has not used ANI enough. And if presentations are about comfort zones (I know PP so that's all I use)… someone's going to fall behind real fast. -dave