Multimedia in Educating Students

This is my first post on this blog.  I have had this blog many years but a course that I am currently taking in using multimedia in education has prompted me to finally post.  We have been doing many projects in this course from how to videos, cartoons, and stop motion videos.  While I find the technology fun and interesting (after all, I am the weird person who loves to learn new software), I find the whole idea, of how this helps learning, mysterious.  Although, I can see in some ways that visualization is helpful to the learning process, I find I have many questions.  Is the process more helpful than other methods?  Is it worth the time? (Many of the projects to explain one small element took hours to construct.)  How do I measure this effort/learning balance.  I am excited to look at the current research to see how these tools and multimedia products will assist our students in learning in new and better ways.  If anyone out there has opinions on this, former students especially, I would love to see your comments.