Unit

Objectives:
Making Multimedia
6
At the end of the unit, the student must have:
• described the four primary stages in a multimedia project;
• discussed the intangible elements needed to make good multimedia: creativity,
organization and communication skills;
• discussed the hardware most often used in making multimedia and choose an
appropriate platform for a project;
• understood common software programs used to handle text, graphics, audio,
video and animation in multimedia projects with corresponding capabilities; and
• determined which multimedia authoring system is most appropriate for any given
project.

6.1 Making Multimedia

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the workshop where multimedia is
made, with guidance and suggestions for getting started, and you will learn about
planning a project. In later chapters, you will learn about producing, managing, and
designing a project; getting material and content; testing your work; and, ultimately,
shipping it to end users or posting it to the Web.

6.2 The Stages of a Multimedia Project

Most multimedia and web projects must be undertaken in stages. Some stages
should be completed before other stages begin, and some stages may be skipped or
combined. Here are the four basic stages in a multimedia project:
1. Planning and costing A project always begin with an idea or a need that you
then refine by outlining its messages and objectives. Identify how you will make
each message and objective work within your authoring system. Before you
begin developing, plan out the writing skills, graphic art, music, video, and other
multimedia expertise that you will require. Develop a creative “look and feel”
(what a user sees on a screen and how he or she interacts with it), as well as
a structure and a navigational system that will allow the viewer to visit the
messages and content. Estimate the time you’ll need to do all the elements, and
then prepare a budget. Work up a short prototype or proof-of-concept, a simple,
working example to demonstrate whether or not your idea is feasible. The ease
with which you can create materials with today’s production and authoring tools
tempts new developers to immediately move into production—jumping in before
planning. This often results in false starts and wasted time and, in the long run,
higher development cost. The more time you spend getting a handle on your
project by defining its content and structure in the beginning, the faster you can
later build it, and the less reworking and rearranging will be required midstream.
Think it through before you start! Your creative ideas and trials will grow into
screens and buttons (or the look and feel), and your proof-of-concept will help
you test whether your ideas will work. You may discover that by breaking the
rules, you can invent something terrific!
2. Designing and producing Perform each of the planned tasks to create a finished
product. During this stage, there may be many feedback cycles with a client until
the client is happy.
 3. Testing Test your programs to make sure that they meet the objectives of your project,
work properly on the intended delivery platforms, and meet the needs of your client or
end user.
4. Delivering Package and deliver the project to the end user. Be prepared to follow up
over time with tweaks, repairs, and upgrades.

6.3 What you Need: The Intangibles

You need hardware, software, and good ideas to make multimedia. To make good
multimedia, you need talent and skill. You also need to stay organized, because as the
construction work gets under way, all the little bits and pieces of multimedia content—the six
audio recordings of Alaskan Eskimos, the Christmas-two-years-ago snapshot of your niece,
the 41 articles still to scan with your optical character recognition (OCR) program—will get lost
under growing piles of paper, CDs, videotapes, phone messages, permissions and releases,
cookie crumbs, Xerox copies, and yesterday’s mail. Even in serious offices, where people
sweep all flat surfaces clear of paperwork and rubber bands at five o’clock, there will be a
mess.
You will need time and money (for consumable resources such as CD-R blanks and
other memory or digital storage, for telephoning and postage, and possibly for paying for
special services and time, yours included), and you will need to budget these precious
commodities.
You may also need the help of other people. Multimedia development of any scale
greater than the most basic level is inherently a team effort: artwork is performed by graphic
artists, video shoots by video producers, sound editing by audio producers, and programming
by programmers. You will certainly wish to provide plenty of coffee and snacks, whether
working alone or as a team. Late nights are often involved in the making of multimedia.

6.3.1 Creativity
Before beginning a multimedia project, you must first develop a sense of its scope and
content. Let the project take shape in your head as you think through the various methods
available to get your message across to your viewers. The most precious asset you can bring
to the multimedia workshop is your creativity. It’s what separates run-of-the-mill or
underwhelming multimedia from compelling, engaging, and award-winning products, whether
we’re talking about a short sales presentation viewed solely by colleagues within your firm or
provided for a fully immersive online game.
You have a lot of room for creative risk taking, because the rules for what works and
what doesn’t work are still being empirically discovered, and there are few known formulas
for multimedia success. Indeed, companies that produce a terrific multimedia title are usually
rewarded in the marketplace, but their success can be fleeting. This is because competitors
often reverse-engineer the product, and then produce knockoffs using similar approaches and
techniques, which appear on the market six months later. Good web site ideas and
programming are easily cloned.
The evolution of multimedia is evident when you look at some of the first multimedia
projects done on computers and compare them to today’s titles. Taking inspiration from
earlier experiments, developers modify and add their own creative touches for designing their
own unique multimedia
projects.
It is very difficult to learn creativity. Some people might say it’s impossible— and that
you have to be born with it. But, like traditional artists who work in paint, marble, or bronze,
the better you know your medium, the better able you are to express your creativity. In the
case of multimedia, this means you need to know your hardware and software first. Once
you’re proficient with the hardware and software tools, you
might ask yourself, “What can I build that will look great, sound great, and knock the socks
off the viewer?” This is a rhetorical question, and its answer is actually another question—
which is simply, “How creative are you?”
6.3.2 Organization
It’s essential that you develop an organized outline and a plan that rationally details
the skills, time, budget, tools, and resources you will need for a project. These should be in
place before you start to render graphics, sounds, and other components, and a protocol
should be established for naming the files so you can organize them for quick retrieval when
you need them. These files—called assets—should continue to be monitored throughout the
project’s execution.

6.3.3 Communication
Many multimedia applications are developed in workgroups comprising instructional
designers, writers, graphic artists, programmers, and musicians located in the same office
space or building. The workgroup members’ computers are typically connected on a local
area network (LAN). The client’s computers, however, may be thousands of miles distant,
requiring other methods for good communication. Communication among workgroup members
and with the client is essential to the efficient and accurate completion of your project. If your
client and you are both connected to the Internet, a combination of Skype video and voice
telephone, e-mail, and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) may be the most cost-effective and
efficient solution for both creative development and project management. In the workplace,
use quality equipment and software for your communications setup. The cost—in both time
and money—of stable and fast networking will be returned to you.

6.4 What you Need: Hardware

This chapter will help you understand the two most significant platforms for producing
and delivering multimedia projects: the Apple Macintosh operating system (OS) and the
Microsoft Windows OS, found running on most Intel-based PCs (including Intel-based
Macintoshes). These computers, with their graphical user interfaces and huge installed base
of many millions of users throughout the world, are the most commonly used platforms for the
development and delivery of today’s multimedia.
Certainly, detailed and animated multimedia is also created on specialized workstations
from Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and even on mainframes, but the Macintosh and
the Windows PC offer a compelling combination of affordability, software availability, and
worldwide obtainability. Regardless of the delivery vehicle for your multimedia—whether it’s
destined to play on a computer, on a Wii, Xbox, or PlayStation game box, or as bits moving
down the data highway—most multimedia will probably be made on a Macintosh or on a PC.
The basic principles for creating and editing multimedia elements are the same for all
platforms. A graphic image is still a graphic image, and a digitized sound is still a digitized
sound, regardless of the methods or tools used to make and display it or to play it back.
Indeed, many software tools readily convert picture, sound, and other multimedia files (and
even whole functioning projects) from Macintosh to Windows format, and vice versa, using
known file formats or even binary compatible files that require no conversion at all. While
there is a lot of talk about platform-independent delivery of multimedia on the Internet, with
every new version of a browser there are still annoying failures on both platforms. These
failures in crossplatform compatibility can consume great amounts of time as you prepare for
delivery by testing and developing workarounds and tweaks so your project performs properly
in various target environments.
Selection of the proper platform for developing your multimedia project may be based
on your personal preference of computer, your budget constraints, project delivery
requirements, and the type of material and content in the project. Many developers believe
that multimedia project development is smoother and easier on the Macintosh than in
Windows, even though projects destined to run in Windows must then be ported and tested
across platforms.
6.4.1 Windows vs. Macintosh
A Windows computer is not a computer per se, but rather a collection of parts that
are tied together by the requirements of the Windows operating system. Power supplies,
processors, hard disks, CD-ROM and DVD players and burners, video and audio components,
monitors, keyboards, mice, WiFi, and Bluetooth transceivers—it doesn’t matter where they
come from or who makes them. Made in Texas, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, Ireland, Mexico, or
Malaysia by widely known or little-known manufacturers, these components are assembled
and branded by Dell, HP, Sony, and others into computers that run Windows. If you are
handy with a Phillips screwdriver and can read instructions, you can even order the parts
and assemble your own computer “clone” to run Windows—at a considerable cost savings!
In the early days, Microsoft organized the major PC hardware manufacturers into the
Multimedia PC Marketing Council, in order to develop a set of specifications that would allow
Windows to deliver a dependable multimedia experience. Since then, the multimedia PC, or
MPC, specification has evolved into “what a computer does.” And it does it all.
Unlike Microsoft, primarily a software company, Apple is a hardware manufacturing
company that developed its own proprietary software to run the hardware. In 2006, Apple
adopted Intel’s processor architecture, an engineering decision that allows Macintoshes to run
natively with any x86 operating system, same as Windows. All recent models of Macintosh
come with the latest Mac operating system, and using Boot Camp or Parallels software,
Macs can also run the Windows operating system.

Networking Macintosh and Windows Computers

If you are working in a multimedia development environment consisting of a mixture of
Macintosh and Windows computers, you will want them to communicate with each other. You
will also wish to share other resources among them, such as printers.
Local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) can connect the
members of a workgroup. In a LAN, workstations are usually located within a short distance
of one another, on the same floor of a building, for example. WANs are communication
systems spanning greater distances, typically set up and managed by large corporations and
institutions for their own use, or to share with other users.
LANs allow direct communication and sharing of peripheral resources such as file
servers, printers, scanners, and network routers. They use a variety of proprietary
technologies to perform the connections, most commonly Ethernet (using twisted-pair copper
wires) and WiFi (using radio). If you are operating a cross-platform multimedia development
shop, you should install a local Ethernet system so that your PCs and Macintoshes can talk
to each other and to your network printers as well. This is many times more efficient than
carrying removable media among your machines. Ethernet is only a method for wiring up
computers, so you still will need client/server software to enable the computers to speak with
each other and pass files back and forth. The Windows and Mac operating systems provide
this networking software, but you may need expert help to set it up—it can be complicated!
Unless you are in a large business or part of government, your WAN is likely the
Internet connected to you by an Internet service provider (ISP); the Internet is worldwide and
connects tens of millions of computers and other devices! If you are working with people in
various time zones (an artist in New York, a programmer in San Francisco, and a client in
Singapore), all can communicate and share information with other locations at any time of
day or night using the Internet network.

6.4.2 Connections
The equipment required for developing your multimedia project will depend on the
content of the project as well as its design. You will certainly need as fast a computer as you
can lay your hands on, with lots of RAM and disk storage space. Table below shows various
device connection methodologies and their data transfer rates.
If you can find content such as sound effects, music, graphic art, clip animations, and
video to use in your project, you may not need extra tools for making your own. Typically,
however, multimedia developers have separate equipment for digitizing sound from tapes or
microphone, for scanning photographs or other printed matter, and for making digital still or
movie images.

SCSI
The Small Computer System Interface (SCSI—pronounced “scuzzy”) adds peripheral
equipment such as disk drives, scanners, CD-ROM players, and other peripheral devices that
conform to the SCSI standard. SCSI connections may connect internal devices such as hard
drives that are inside the chassis of your computer and use the computer’s power supply,
and external devices, which are outside the chassis, use their own power supply, and are
plugged into the computer by cable.
The hardware and the drivers for SCSI have improved over the years to provide faster
data transfers across wider buses. Unlike the less expensive IDE scheme described next, a
SCSI controller does not demand CPU time, and because it can support many devices, it is
often preferred for real-time video editing, network servers, and situations in which writing
simultaneously to two or more disks (mirroring) is required.

IDE, EIDE, Ultra IDE, ATA, and Ultra ATA

Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) connections, also known as Advanced Technology
Attachment (ATA) connections, are typically only internal, and they connect hard disks, CD-
ROM drives, and other peripherals mounted inside the PC. With IDE controllers, you can
install a combination of hard disks, CD-ROM drives, or other devices in your PC. The circuitry
for IDE is typically much less expensive than for SCSI, but comes with some limitations. For
example, IDE requires time from the main processor chip, so only one drive in a master/slave
pair can be active at once.

USB
A consortium of industry players including Compaq, Digital Equipment, IBM, Intel,
Microsoft, NEC, and Northern Telecom was formed in 1995 to promote a Universal Serial Bus
(USB) standard for connecting devices to a computer. These devices are automatically
recognized (“plug-andplay”) and installed without users needing to install special cards or turn
the computer off and on when making the connection (allowing “hotswapping”). USB
technology has improved in performance since its introduction and has become the
connection method of choice for many peripheral devices, from cameras to keyboards to
scanners and printers. USB uses a single cable to connect as many as 127 USB peripherals
to a single personal computer. Hubs can be used to “daisychain” many devices. USB
connections are now common on video game consoles, cameras, GPS locators, cell phones,
televisions, MP3 players, PDAs, and portable memory devices.

FireWire and i.LINK (IEEE 1394)

FireWire was introduced by Apple in the late 1980s, and in 1995 it became an industry
standard (IEEE 1394) supporting high-bandwidth serial data transfer, particularly for digital
video and mass storage. Like USB, the standard supports hot-swapping and plug-and-play,
but it is faster, and while USB devices can only be attached to one computer at a time,
FireWire can connect multiple computers and peripheral devices (peer-to-peer). Both the Mac
OS and Windows offer IEEE 1394 support. Because the standard has been endorsed by the
Electronics Industries Association and the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), it
has become a common method for connecting and interconnecting professional digital video
gear, from cameras to recorders and edit suites. Sony calls this standard i.LINK. FireWire has
replaced Parallel SCSI in many applications because it’s cheaper and because it has a
simpler, adaptive
cabling system.

6.4.3 Memory and Storage Devices

As you add more memory and storage space to your computer, you can expect your
computing needs and habits to keep pace, filling the new capacity. So, enjoy the weeks that
follow a memory storage upgrade or the addition of a gigabyte hard disk; the honeymoon will
eventually end.
To estimate the memory requirements of a multimedia project—the space required on
a hard disk, thumb drive, CD-ROM, or DVD, not the random access memory (RAM) used
while your computer is running—you must have a sense of the project’s content and scope.
Color images, text, sound bites, video clips, and the programming code that glues it all
together require memory; if there are many of these elements, you will need even more. If
you are making multimedia, you will also need to allocate memory for storing and archiving
working files used during production, original audio and video clips, edited pieces, and final
mixed pieces, production paperwork and correspondence, and at least one backup of your
project files, with a second backup stored at another location.
It is said that when John von Neumann, often called “the father of the computer,”
was designing the ENIAC computer in 1945, there was an argument about how much memory
this first computer should have. His colleagues appealed for more than the 2K Dr. von
Neumann felt was sufficient. In the end, he capitulated and agreed to install 4K in the
ENIAC, commenting “...but this is more memory than you will ever need.”

Random Access Memory (RAM)

If you are faced with budget constraints, you can certainly produce a multimedia
project on a slower or limited-memory computer. On the other hand, it is profoundly
frustrating to face memory (RAM) shortages time after time, when you’re attempting to keep
multiple applications and files open simultaneously. It is also frustrating to wait the extra
seconds required of each editing step when working with multimedia material on a slow
processor.
In spite of all the marketing hype about processor speed, this speed is ineffective if
not accompanied by sufficient RAM. A fast processor without enough RAM may waste
processor cycles while it swaps needed portions of program code into and out of memory. In
some cases, increasing available RAM may show more performance improvement on your
system than upgrading the processor chip.

Read-Only Memory (ROM)

Unlike RAM, read-only memory (ROM) is not volatile. When you turn off the power to a ROM
chip, it will not forget, or lose its memory. ROM is typically used in computers to hold the
small BIOS program that initially boots up the computer, and it is used in printers to hold
built-in fonts. Programmable ROMs (called EPROMs) allow changes to be made that are not
forgotten when power is turned off.
 Hard Disks
Adequate storage space for your production environment can be provided by large-
capacity hard disks, server-mounted on a network. As multimedia has reached consumer
desktops, makers of hard disks have built smaller-profile, larger-capacity, faster, and less-
expensive hard disks. As network and Internet servers drive the demand for centralized data
storage requiring terabytes (one trillion bytes), hard disks are often configured into fail-proof
redundant arrays offering built-in protection against crashes.

Flash Memory or Thumb Drives

These flash memory data storage devices are about the size of a thin cigarette lighter and
can be integrated with USB or FireWire interfaces to store from eight megabytes to several
GB of data. They are available in every color of the rainbow, are extremely portable, and,
because they have fewer moving parts, are more reliable than disk drives. Consisting of a
small printed circuit board encased in a sturdy metal or plastic casing with a USB connector
covered with a cap, the flash drive is trendy as a status symbol, and convenient to use. This
same solid-state storage is used in digital cameras, cell phones, and audio recording devices,
and for solid-state hard drives (no spinning platters or moving parts) that are found in some
netbooks and other handheld devices.

CD-ROM Discs
Compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM) players have become an integral part of
the multimedia development workstation and are an important delivery vehicle for mass-
produced projects. A wide variety of developer utilities, graphic backgrounds, stock
photography and sounds, applications, games, reference texts, and educational software are
available on this medium. CD-ROM players have typically been very slow to access and
transmit data (150 KBps, which is the speed required of consumer Audio CDs), but
developments have led to double-, triple-, quadruple speed, 24x, 48x, and 56x drives designed
specifically for computer (not Red Book Audio) use. These faster drives spool up like washing
machines on the spin cycle and can be somewhat noisy, especially if the inserted compact
disc is not evenly balanced. With a compact disc recorder, you can make your own CDs,
using CD-recordable (CD-R) blank discs to create a CD in most formats of CD-ROM and CD-
Audio. Software, such as Roxio’s Toast and Easy CD Creator, lets you organize files on your
hard disk(s) into a “virtual” structure, and then writes them to the CD in that order. CD-R
discs are manufactured differently than normal CDs but can play in any CD-Audio or CD-
ROM player. These write once, enhanced CDs make excellent high-capacity file archives and
are used extensively by multimedia developers for pre-mastering and testing CD-ROM
projects and titles. Because they have become very inexpensive, they are also used for short-
run distribution of finished multimedia projects and data backup. A CD-RW (read and write)
recorder can rewrite 700MB of data to a CD-RW disc about 1,000 times.

Digital Versatile Discs (DVD)

In December 1995, nine major electronics companies (Toshiba, Matsushita, Sony,
Philips, Time Warner, Pioneer, JVC, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi Electric) agreed to promote a new
optical disc technology for distribution of multimedia and feature-length movies called Digital
Versatile Disc (DVD).With a DVD capable not only of gigabyte storage capacity but also full-
motion video (MPEG2) and high-quality audio in surround sound, this is an excellent medium
for delivery of multimedia projects. Commercial multimedia projects will become more
expensive to produce, however, as consumers’ performance expectations rise. There are
three types of DVD, including DVD-Read Write, DVD-Video, and DVD-ROM. These types
reflect marketing channels, not the technology.

Blu-ray Discs
Driven by the implementation of High Definition TV (HDTV) and by the motion picture
industry, a new technology was needed to increase storage capacity and throughput beyond
DVD. Two competing and incompatible solutions were promoted and a war was fought in the
marketplace between HD-DVD, backed by Toshiba, and Blu-ray, backed by Sony. By 2008,
Toshiba had sold about one million HD-DVD players, but Sony had sold close to ten million
Blu-ray players, which were also included in popular PlayStation game machines. Toshiba
announced it was quitting. Blu-ray is promoted not only for high definition television recording
and high definition video distribution, but also for high definition camcorder archiving, mass
data storage, and digital asset management and professional storage when used as a
recording medium in BD-R format.

6.4.4 Input Devices

A great variety of input devices—from the familiar keyboard and handy mouse to
touchscreens and voice recognition setups—can be used for the development and delivery of
a multimedia project. If you are designing your project for a public kiosk, use a touchscreen.
If your project is for a lecturing professor who likes to wander about the classroom, use a
remote handheld mouse. If you create a great deal of original computer-rendered art,
consider a pressure-sensitive stylus and a drawing tablet. Scanners enable you to use optical
character recognition (OCR) software, such as OmniPage from ScanSoft, a division of Nuance
Communications, or Recore from Maxsoft-Ocron. With OCR software and a scanner, you can
convert paper documents into a word processing document on your computer without retyping
or rekeying.
 Barcode readers are probably the most familiar optical character recognition devices in
use today—mostly at markets, shops, and other point of-purchase locations. Using photo cells
and laser beams, barcode readers recognize the numeric characters of the Universal Product
Code (UPC) that are printed in a pattern of parallel black bars on merchandise labels. With
OCR, or barcoding, retailers can efficiently process goods in and out of their stores and
maintain better inventory control.
An OCR terminal can be of use to a multimedia developer because it recognizes not
only printed characters but also handwriting. This facility may be beneficial at a kiosk or in a
general education environment where user friendliness is a goal, because there is growing
demand for a more personal and less technical interface to data and information.
For hands-free interaction with your project, try voice recognition systems. These
behavioral biometric systems usually provide a unidirectional cardioid, noise-canceling
microphone that automatically filters out background noise and learns to recognize voiceprints.
Most voice recognition systems currently available can trigger common menu events such as
Save, Open, Quit, and Print, and you can teach the system to recognize other commands
that are more specific to your application. Systems available for the Macintosh and Windows
environments typically must be taught to recognize individual voices and then be programmed
with the appropriate responses to the recognized word or phrase. Dragon’s Naturally
Speaking takes dictation, translates text to speech, and does command-toclick, a serious aid
for people unable to use their hands.
The quality of your audio recordings is greatly affected by the caliber of your
microphone and cables. A unidirectional microphone helps filter out external noise, and good
cables help reduce noise emitted from surrounding electronic equipment.
Digital cameras use the same CCD technology as video cameras. They capture still
images of a given number of pixels (resolution), and the images are stored in the camera’s
memory to be uploaded later to a computer. The resolution of a digital camera is determined
by the number of pixels on the CCD chip, and the higher the megapixel rating, the higher
the resolution of the camera. Images are uploaded from the camera’s memory using a serial,
parallel, or USB cable, or, alternatively, the camera’s memory card is inserted into a PCMCIA
reader connected to the computer. Digital cameras are small enough to fit in a cell phone,
and in a more complicated manner they can be used in a television studio or spy camera on
an orbiting spacecraft.

6.4.5 Output Devices

Presentation of the audio and visual components of your multimedia project requires
hardware that may or may not be included with the computer itself, such as speakers,
amplifiers, projectors, and motion video devices. It goes without saying that the better the
equipment is, of course, the better the presentation. There is no greater test of the benefits
of good output hardware than to feed the audio output of your computer into an external
amplifier system: suddenly the bass sounds become deeper and richer, and even music
sampled at low quality may sound acceptable.

TIP Design your project to use many shorter-duration audio files rather than one long file. This simplifies the
redaction of your project within your authoring system, and it may also improve performance because you will load shorter
segments of sound into RAM at any one time.

Often the speakers you use during a project’s development will not be adequate for its
presentation. Speakers with built-in amplifiers or attached to an external amplifier are
important when your project will be presented to a large audience or in a noisy setting.

WARNING Always use magnetically shielded speakers to prevent color distortion or damage to nearby CRT monitors.
 The monitor you need for development of multimedia projects depends on the type of
multimedia application you are creating, as well as what computer you’re using. A wide
variety of monitors is available for both Macintoshes and PCs. High-end, large-screen
graphics monitors and LCD panels are available for both, and they are expensive.
Serious multimedia developers will often attach more than one monitor to their
computers because they can work with several open windows at a time. For example, you
can dedicate one monitor to viewing the work you are creating or designing, and you can
perform various editing tasks in windows on other monitors that do not block the view of your
work.
No other contemporary message medium has the visual impact of video, but keep in
mind that while good video greatly enhances your project, poor video will ruin it.
When you need to show your material to more viewers than can huddle around a computer
monitor, you will need to project it onto a large screen or even a white-painted wall.
Cathode-ray tube (CRT) projectors, liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, Digital Light Processing
(DLP) projectors, and liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) projectors, as well as (for larger projects)
Grating-Light-Valve (GLV) technologies, are available. CRT projectors have been around for
quite a while—they are the original “big-screen” televisions and use three separate projection
tubes and lenses (red, green, and blue). The three-color channels of light must “converge”
accurately on the screen. Setup, focusing, and alignment are important for getting a clear
and crisp picture. CRT projectors are compatible with the output of most computers as well
as televisions.
Graphic print designers often use special color-correction hardware to ensure that
what they see on screen matches precisely what will be printed. Multimedia does not usually
require the same level of precision—mostly because the multimedia will likely be presented on
any number of monitors with widely varying color settings.
Hard-copy printed output has also entered the multimedia scene. From storyboards to
presentations to production of collateral marketing material, printouts are an important part of
the multimedia development environment. Color helps clarify concepts, improve understanding
and retention of information, and organize complex data. As multimedia designers already
know, intelligent use of color is critical to the success of a project.

6.5 What you Need: Software

Multimedia software tells the hardware what to do. Display the color red. Move that
tiger three leaps to the left. Slide in the words “Now You’ve Done It!” from the right and
blink them on and off. Play the sound of cymbals crashing. Run the digitized trailer for
Avatar. Turn down the volume on that MP3 file!
The basic tool set for building multimedia projects contains one or more authoring
systems and various editing applications for text, images, sounds, and motion video. A few
additional applications are also useful for capturing images from the screen, translating file
formats, and moving files among computers when you are part of a team—these are tools
for the housekeeping tasks that make your creative and production life easier.
The software in your multimedia toolkit—and your skill at using it—determines what
kind of multimedia work you can do and how fine and fancy you can render it. Making good
multimedia means picking a successful route through the software swamp. Alligators and
learning curves can rise up out of this swamp to nip you in the knees.
You don’t have to be a programmer or a computer scientist to make multimedia work for
you, but you do need some familiarity with terms and building blocks; as even the simplest
multimedia tools require a modicum of knowledge to operate. If someone asks to borrow a
metric 13 mm wrench, you should know they are probably working with a nut or a bolt (and if
you are an expert, you might know that a 1/2-inch wrench can usually be substituted). If
someone sends you a file in Macintosh AIF format, you should know that you’re getting
digitized sound. Don’t be afraid of the little things that so easily depress the uninformed.
From plumbing to nuclear physics, learning is a matter of time and practice. You will be
frustrated as you work your way up the learning curves of multimedia.
 TIP As you explore the workings of multimedia, you should know that web addresses are not guaranteed to be
permanent but can abruptly disappear, just like the addresses for physical locations when the house burns down or floats
away in a flood.
Microsoft.com, walmart.com, mcdonalds.com, and visa.com, however, represent such monoliths of business that it
seems unlikely that they will float away, at least soon, in the river of time. If, when trying to connect to a URL, you receive a
“404 – not found” error message, try stripping away the directories and subdirectories and filenames from the URL and then
connect to the domain name itself. If you can connect to the domain name, you may find a menu that will then take you to
the relocated document from another direction. If, for example, you are looking for a list of tools useful to web service
providers at www.w3.org/hypertext/www/tools/ and the document is not there, try to connect to www.w3.org/,
and then follow the hypertext menus provided. If none of these efforts brings you to your destination, you can try one of the
search engines.

Keep your tools sharp by upgrading them when new software and features become available,
by thoroughly studying and learning each tool, by keeping an eye on the conversations and FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) files online and in Internet blogs, and by observing the practices and
products of other multimedia developers. Remember, each new tool has a learning curve.

TIP Always fill out the registration card for your new software and return it to the vendor, or register online. If the
vendor pays attention to product marketing, you will frequently receive upgrade offers, special newsletters, and e-mails with
helpful information.

The tools used for creating and editing multimedia elements on both Windows and
Macintosh platforms do image processing and editing, drawing and illustration, 3-D and CAD,
OCR and text editing, sound recording and editing, video and moviemaking, and various
utilitarian housekeeping tasks.

6.5.1 Text Editing and Word Processing Tools

A word processor is usually the first software tool computer users learn. From letters,
invoices, and storyboards to project content, your word processor may also be your most
often used tool, as you design and build a multimedia project. The better your keyboarding or
typing skills, the easier and more efficient your multimedia day-to-day life will be.
Typically, an office or workgroup will choose a single word processor to share
documents in a standard format. And most often, that word processor comes bundled in an
office suite that might include spreadsheet, database, e-mail, web browser, and presentation
applications.
Word processors such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect are powerful applications
that include spell checkers, table formatters, thesauruses, and prebuilt templates for letters,
résumés, purchase orders, and other common documents.
Many developers have begun to use OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) for word
processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases, and more. It can be
downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose and is available in many
languages. It can read and write files from other, more expensive, office packages. In many
word processors, you can embed multimedia elements such as sounds, images, and video.
Luckily, the population of single-finger typists is decreasing over time as children are taught
keyboarding skills in conjunction with computer lab programs in their schools.

6.5.2 OCR Software

Often you will have printed matter and other text to incorporate into your project, but
no electronic text file. With OCR software, a flatbed scanner, and your computer, you can
save many hours of rekeying printed words, and get the job done faster and more accurately
than a roomful of typists.
OCR software turns bitmapped characters into electronically recognizable ASCII text. A
scanner is typically used to create the bitmap. Then the software breaks the bitmap into
chunks according to whether it contains text or graphics, by examining the texture and
density of areas of the bitmap and by detecting edges. The text areas of the image are then
converted to ASCII characters using probability and expert system algorithms. Most OCR
applications claim about 99 percent accuracy when reading 8- to 36-point printed characters
at 300 dpi and can reach processing speeds of about 150 characters per second. These
programs do, however, have difficulty recognizing poor copies of originals where the edges
of characters have bled; these and poorly received faxes in small print may yield more
recognition errors than it is worthwhile to correct after the attempted recognition.

6.5.3 Painting and Drawing Tools

Painting and drawing tools, as well as 3-D modelers, are perhaps the most important
items in your toolkit because, of all the multimedia elements, the graphical impact of your
project will likely have the greatest influence on the end user. If your artwork is amateurish,
or flat and uninteresting, both you and your users will be disappointed.
Painting software, such as Photoshop, Fireworks, and Painter, is dedicated to
producing crafted bitmap images. Drawing software, such as CorelDraw, FreeHand, Illustrator,
Designer, and Canvas, is dedicated to producing vector-based line art easily printed to paper
at high resolution.
Some software applications combine drawing and painting capabilities, but many
authoring systems can import only bitmapped images. The differences between painting and
drawing (that is, between bitmapped and drawn images). Typically, bitmapped images provide
the greatest choice and power to the artist for rendering fine detail and effects, and today
bitmaps are used in multimedia more often than drawn objects. Some vector-based packages
such as Macromedia’s Flash are aimed at reducing file download times on the Web and may
contain both bitmaps and drawn art.
Look for these features in a drawing or painting package:
■ An intuitive graphical user interface with pull-down menus, status
bars, palette control, and dialog boxes for quick, logical selection
■ Scalable dimensions, so that you can resize, stretch, and distort both
large and small bitmaps
■ Paint tools to create geometric shapes, from squares to circles and
from curves to complex polygons
■ The ability to pour a color, pattern, or gradient into any area
■ The ability to paint with patterns and clip art
■ Customizable pen and brush shapes and
■ An eyedropper tool that samples colors
■ An autotrace tool that turns bitmap shapes into vector-based outlines
■ Support for scalable text fonts and drop shadows
■ Multiple undo capabilities, to let you try again
■ A history function for redoing effects, drawings, and text
■ A property inspector
■ A screen capture facility
■ Painting features such as smoothing coarse-edged objects into the
background with anti-aliasing; airbrushing in variable sizes, shapes, densities,
and patterns; washing colors in gradients; blending; and masking.
■ Support for third-party special-effect plug-ins
■ Object and layering capabilities that allow you to treat separate elements
independently
■ Zooming, for magnified pixel editing
■ All common color depths: 1-, 4-, 8-, and 16-, 24-, or 32-bit color, and
gray-scale
■ Good color management and dithering capability among color depths
using various color models such as RGB, HSB, and CMYK
■ Good palette management when in 8-bit mode
■ Good file importing and exporting capability for image formats such as
PIC, GIF, TGA, TIF, PNG, WMF, JPG, PCX, EPS, PTN, and BMP
 If you are new to multimedia and to these tools, you should take time to examine more than
one graphics software package. Find someone who is already familiar with graphics applications. You
will spend many days learning to use your painting and drawing software, and if it does not fit you
and your needs, you will be unhappy. Many artists learn to use a single, powerful tool well.

6.5.4 3-D Modeling and Animation Tools

3-D modeling software has increasingly entered the mainstream of graphic design as
its ease of use improves. As a result, the graphic production values and expectations for
multimedia projects have risen.
3-D is an abbreviation for “three dimensions.” While in a 2-D graphics program,
images are painted in the “x” (horizontal or width) and “y” (vertical or height) axes, in 3-D
depth is labeled as the “z” axis. Every program that layers objects on the screen must know
each object’s “z” axis. Web browsers, for example, place objects on the screen using the
CSS “z-index” attribute. Some software programs (such as Flash CS4 and ToonBoom Studio)
can simulate depth by automatically scaling images based on a z-axis value to create a
cartoonish or simulated 3-D effect. This differs from true 3-D modeling and rendering, where
objects can be rotated and viewed from any direction or angle.
With 3-D modeling software, objects rendered in perspective appear more realistic; you
can create stunning scenes and wander through them, choosing just the right lighting and
perspective for your final rendered image. Powerful modeling packages such as VectorWorks,
AutoDesk’s Maya, Strata 3D, and Avid’s SoftImage are also bundled with assortments of
prerendered 3-D clip art objects such as people, furniture, buildings, cars, airplanes, trees,
and plants. Blender is a powerful (and free) cross-platform 3-D modeling program offering an
extensive feature set. Google SketchUp is a free 3-D modeling program with limited
capabilities, but with a large online library of components. Important for multimedia
development, many 3-D modeling applications include export facilities for creating and saving
a moving view or journey through a scene as a QuickTime or MPEG file.
Each rendered 3-D image takes from a few seconds to a few hours to complete,
depending upon the complexity of the drawing and the number of drawn objects included in
it. If you are making a complex walkthrough or flyby, plan to set aside many hours of
rendering time on your computer.

A good 3-D modeling tool should include the following features:

■ Multiple windows that allow you to view your model in each dimension, from the
camera’s perspective, and in a rendered preview
■ The ability to drag and drop primitive shapes into a scene
■ The ability to create and sculpt organic objects from scratch
■ Lathe and extrude features
■ Color and texture mapping
■ The ability to add realistic effects such as transparency, shadowing, and fog
■ The ability to add spot, local, and global lights, to place them anywhere, and
manipulate them for
special lighting
effects
■ Unlimited
cameras with focal
length control
■ The ability to
draw spline-based
paths for animation
6.5.5 Image-Editing Tools
Image-editing applications are specialized and powerful tools for creating, enhancing,
and retouching existing bitmapped images. These applications also provide many of the
features and tools of painting and drawing programs and can be used to create images from
scratch as well as images digitized from scanners, video frame-grabbers, digital cameras, clip
art files, or original artwork files created with a painting or drawing package.

Here are some features typical of image-editing applications and of interest to

multimedia developers:
■ Multiple windows that provide views of more than one image at a time
■ Conversion of major image-data types and industry-standard file formats
■ Direct inputs of images from scanner and video sources
■ Employment of a virtual memory scheme that uses hard disk space as RAM for
images that require large amounts of memory
■ Capable selection tools, such as rectangles, lassos, and magic wands, for selecting
portions of a bitmap
■ Image and balance controls for brightness, contrast, and color balance
■ Good masking features
■ Multiple undo and restore features
■ Anti-aliasing capability, and sharpening and smoothing controls
■ Color-mapping controls for precise adjustment of color balance
■ Tools for retouching, blurring, sharpening, lightening, darkening, smudging, and
tinting
■ Geometric transformations such as flip, skew, rotate, and distort, and perspective
changes
■ The ability to resample and resize an image
■ 24-bit color, 8- or 4-bit indexed color, 8-bit gray-scale, black-and white, and
customizable color palettes
■ The ability to create images from scratch, using line, rectangle, square, circle, ellipse,
polygon, airbrush, paintbrush, pencil, and eraser tools, with customizable brush shapes
and user-definable bucket and gradient
fills
■ Multiple typefaces, styles, and sizes, and type manipulation and masking
routines
■ Filters for special effects, such as crystallize, dry brush, emboss, facet, fresco,
graphic pen, mosaic, pixelized, poster, ripple, smooth, splatter, stucco, twirl, watercolor,
wave, and wind
■ Support for third-party special-effect plug-ins
■ The ability to design in layers that can be combined, hidden, and reordered

6.5.6 Sound-Editing Tools

Sound-editing tools for both digitized and MIDI sound let you see music as well as
hear it. By drawing a representation of a sound in fine increments, whether a score or a
waveform, you can cut, copy, paste, and otherwise edit segments of it with great precision—
something impossible to do in real time (that is, with the music playing).

6.5.7 Animation, Video, and Digital Movie Tools

Animations and digital video movies are sequences of bitmapped graphic scenes
(frames), rapidly played back. But animations can also be made within the authoring system
by rapidly changing the location of objects, or sprites, to generate an appearance of motion.
Most authoring tools adopt either a frame- or object-oriented approach to animation, but
rarely both.
To make movies from video, you may need special hardware to convert an analog
video signal to digital data. Macs and PCs with FireWire (IEEE 1394) or USB ports can import
digital video directly from digital camcorders. Moviemaking tools such as Premiere, Final Cut
Pro, VideoShop, and MediaStudio Pro let you edit and assemble video clips captured from
camera, tape, other digitized movie segments, animations, scanned images, and from digitized
audio or MIDI files. The completed clip, often with added transition and visual effects, can
then be played back—either standalone or windowed within your project.

6.5.8 Helpful Accessories

No multimedia toolkit is complete without a few indispensable utilities for performing
some odd, but oft-repeated, tasks. These are the comfortable and well-worn accessories that
make your computer life easier.
On both the Macintosh and in Windows, a screen-grabber is essential. Because
bitmapped images are so common in multimedia, it is important to have a tool for grabbing
all or part of the screen display so that you can import it into your authoring system or copy
it into an image-editing application for custom work. Screen-grabbing to the clipboard, for
example, lets you move a bitmapped image from one application to another without the
cumbersome steps of first exporting the image to a file and then importing it back into the
destination application. In Windows, press the print screen key to place the contents of your
screen onto the clipboard. On a Macintosh, press the command key, the control key, the shift
key, and the number 4 all at the same time, and then drag a rectangle across the screen.
Whatever is in the rectangle is then placed on the clipboard, ready for pasting into an
image-editing application. In Mac OS X, you can also use the Grab utility to capture the
screen.
Format converters are additional indispensable tools for projects in which your source
material may originate on Macintoshes, PCs, Unix workstations, or even mainframes. This is
an issue particularly with video and audio files, because there are many formats and many
compression schemes.

6.6 What you Need: Authoring Systems

Multimedia authoring tools provide the important framework you need for organizing
and editing the elements of your multimedia project, including graphics, sounds, animations,
and video clips. Authoring tools are used for designing interactivity and the user interface, for
presenting your project on screen, and for assembling diverse multimedia elements into a
single, cohesive product.

Authoring software provides an integrated environment for binding together the content
and functions of your project, and typically includes everything you need to create, edit, and
import specific types of data; assemble raw data into a playback sequence or cue sheet; and
provide a structured method or language for responding to user input. With multimedia
authoring software, you can make

■ Video productions
■ Animations
■ Games
■ Interactive web sites
■ Demo disks and guided tours
■ Presentations
■ Kiosk applications
■ Interactive training
■ Simulations, prototypes, and technical visualizations

6.6.1 Helpful Ways to get Started

Don’t be overwhelmed when starting your multimedia project—there may be a lot of
things to think about, but there are also a lot of things that have already been done for you.
As the cliché goes, “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel!” Consider the following tips for
making your production work go smoothly:
■ Use templates that people have already created to set up your production. These
can include appropriate styles for all sorts of data, font sets, color arrangements, and
particular page setups that will save you time.
■ Use wizards when they are available—they may save you much time and pre-setup
work.
■ Use named styles, because if you take the time to create your own it will really slow
you down. Unless your client specifically requests a particular style, you will save a
great deal of time using something
already created, usable, and legal.
■ Create tables, which you can build with a few keystrokes in many programs, and it
makes the production look credible.
■ Help readers find information with tables of contents, running headers and footers,
and indexes.
■ Improve document appearance with bulleted and numbered lists and symbols.
■ Allow for a quick-change replacement using the global change feature.
■ Reduce grammatical errors by using the grammar and spell checker provided with
the software. Do not rely on that feature, though, to set all things right—you still need
to proofread everything.
■ Include identifying information in the filename so you can find the file later.

6.6.2 Making an Instant Multimedia

While this section discusses dedicated multimedia authoring systems, there is no reason
to invest in such a package if your current software (or an inexpensive upgrade) can do the
job. Indeed, not only can you save money by doing multimedia with tools that are familiar
and already at hand, but you also save the time spent on the arduous and sometimes
lengthy learning curves involved in mastering many of the dedicated authoring systems.
Common desktop tools have become multimedia-powerful.
Some multimedia projects may be so simple that you can cram all the organizing,
planning, rendering, and testing stages into a single effort, and make “instant” multimedia.
Here is an example: The topic at your weekly sales meeting is sales force
performance. You want to display your usual spreadsheet so that the group can see real
names and numbers for each member of the team, but then you want to add an animated,
multicolored 3-D bar graph for visual impact. Preparing for your meeting, you annotate the
cell containing the name of the most productive salesperson for the week, using sounds of
applause found on the Web or a recording of your CEO saying “Good job!” or a colleague’s
“Wait till next week, Pete!” At the appropriate time during the meeting, you click that cell and
play the file. And that’s it—you have just made and used instant multimedia.
You can use a voice annotation, picture, or video clip in many word processing
applications. You can also click a cell in a spreadsheet to enhance its content with graphic
images, sounds, and animations. If you like, your database can include pictures, audio clips,
and movies, and your presentation software can generate interesting titles, visual effects, and
animated illustrations for your product demo. With these multimedia-enhanced software
packages, you get many more ways to effectively convey your message than just a slide
show.

6.6.3 Types of Authoring Tools

Each multimedia project you undertake will have its own underlying structure and
purpose and will require different features and functions.
E-learning modules such as those seen on PDAs, MP3 players, and intra-college
networks may include web-based teaching materials, multimedia CD-ROMs or web sites,
discussion boards, collaborative software, wikis, simulations, games, electric voting systems,
blogs, computer-aided assessment, simulations, animation, blogs, learning management
software, and e-mail. This is also referred to as distance learning or blended learning, where
online learning is mixed with face-to-face learning.
The various multimedia authoring tools can be categorized into three groups, based on
the method used for sequencing or organizing multimedia elements and events:
■ Card- or page-based tools
■ Icon-based, event-driven multimedia and game-authoring tools
■ Time-based tools

Card- and Page-Based Authoring Tools

Card-based or page-based tools are authoring systems, wherein the elements are
organized as pages of a book or a stack of cards. Thousands of pages or cards may be
available in the book or stack. These tools are best used when the bulk of your content
consists of elements that can be viewed individually, letting the authoring system link these
pages or cards into organized sequences. You can jump, on command, to any page you wish
in the structured navigation pattern.
Page-based authoring systems such as LiveCode from Runtime Revolution
(www.runrev.com) and ToolBook (www.toolbook.org) contain media objects: buttons, text fields,
graphic objects, backgrounds, pages or cards, and even the project itself. The characteristics
of objects are defined by properties (highlighted, bold, red, hidden, active, locked, and so on).
Each object may contain a programming script, usually a property of that object, activated
when an event (such as a mouse click) related to that object occurs. Events cause messages
to pass along the hierarchy of objects in the project; for example, a mouse-clicked message
could be sent from a button to the background, to the page, and then to the project
itself. As the message traveled, it looks for handlers in the script of each object; if it finds a
matching handler, the authoring system then executes the task specified by that handler.
Following are some typical messages that might pass along the object hierarchy of the
LiveCode and ToolBook authoring systems:

Now let’s look at specific examples. To go to the next card or page when a button is
clicked, place a message handler into the script of that button. An example in RunRev’s
LiveCode language would be:
on mouseUp
go next card
end mouseUp

An example in ToolBook’s OpenScript language would look like:

to handle buttonUp
go next page
end buttonUp
 The handler, if placed in the script of the card or page, executes its commands when
it receives a “mouseUp” or “buttonUp” event message that occurs at any location on the
card or page—not just while the cursor is within the bounds of a button.
Card- and page-based systems typically provide two separate layers on each card: a
background layer that can be shared among many cards, and a foreground layer that is
specific to a single card.

Icon- and Object-Based Authoring Tools

Icon- or object-based, event-driven tools are authoring systems, wherein multimedia
elements and interaction cues (events) are organized as objects in a structural framework or
process. Icon- or object-based, event-driven tools simplify the organization of your project and
typically display flow diagrams of activities along branching paths. In complicated navigational
structures, this charting is particularly useful during development.
Icon-based, event-driven tools provide a visual programming approach to organizing
and presenting multimedia. First you build a structure or flowchart of events, tasks, and
decisions, by dragging appropriate icons from a library. These icons can include menu
choices, graphic images, sounds, and computations. The flowchart graphically depicts the
project’s logic. When the structure is built, you can add your content: text, graphics,
animation, sounds, and video movies. Then, to refine your project, you edit your logical
structure by rearranging and fine-tuning the icons and their properties.
With icon-based authoring tools, non-technical multimedia authors can build
sophisticated applications without scripting. In Authorware from Adobe, by placing icons on a
flow line, you can quickly sequence events and activities, including decisions and user
interactions. These tools are useful for storyboarding, as you can change sequences, add
options, and restructure interactions by simply dragging and dropping icons. You can print out
your navigation map or flowchart, an annotated project index with or without associated
icons, design and presentation windows, and a cross-reference table of variables.

Time-Based Authoring Tools

Time-based tools are authoring systems, wherein elements and events are organized
along a timeline, with resolutions as high as or higher than 1/30 second. Time-based tools are
best to use when you have a message with a beginning and an end. Sequentially organized
graphic frames are played back at a speed that you can set. Other elements (such as audio
events) are triggered at a given time or location in the sequence of events. The more
powerful time-based tools let you program jumps to any location
in a sequence, thereby adding navigation and interactive control.
Each tool uses its own distinctive approach and user interface for managing events
over time. Many use a visual timeline for sequencing the events of a multimedia presentation,
often displaying layers of various media elements or events alongside the scale in increments
as precise as one second. Others arrange long sequences of graphic frames and add the
time component by adjusting each frame’s duration of play.

Flash Flash is a time-based development environment. Flash, however, is also particularly

focused on delivery of rich multimedia content to the Web. With the Flash Player plug-in
installed in more than 95 percent of the world’s browsers, Flash delivers far more than simple
static HTML pages. ActionScript, the proprietary, under-the-hood scripting language of Flash,
is based upon the international ECMAScript standard derived from Netscape’s original
JavaScript.

Director Adobe’s Director is a powerful and complex multimedia authoring tool with a broad
set of features to create multimedia presentations, animations, and interactive multimedia
applications. It requires a significant learning curve, but once mastered, it is among the most
powerful of multimedia development tools. In Director, you assemble and sequence the
elements of your project, called a “movie,” using a Cast and a Score. The Cast is a
multimedia database containing still images, sound files, text, palettes, QuickDraw shapes,
programming scripts, QuickTime movies, Flash movies, and even other Director files. You tie
these Cast members together using the Score facility, which is a sequencer for displaying,
animating, and playing Cast members, and it is made up of frames that contain Cast
members, tempo, a palette, timing, and sound information. Each frame is played back on a
stage at a rate specified in the tempo channel. Director utilizes Lingo, a full-featured object-
oriented scripting language, to enable interactivity and programmed control.

6.6.4 Objects
In multimedia authoring systems, multimedia elements and events are often treated as
objects that live in a hierarchical order of parent and child relationships. Messages passed
among these objects order them to do things according to the properties or modifiers
assigned to them. In this way, for example, Teen-child (a teenager object) may be
programmed to take out the trash every Friday evening, and does so when they get a
message from Dad. Spot, the puppy, may bark and jump up and down when the postman
arrives, and is defined by barking and jumping modifiers. Objects typically take care of
themselves. Send them a message and they do their thing without external procedures and
programming. Objects are particularly useful for games, which contain many components with
many “personalities,” all for simulating real-life situations, events, and their constituent
properties.
Object-based authoring programs typically provide objects pre- programmed with
sensible properties, messages, and functions. A video object, for example, will likely have a
duration property (how long the video plays) and a source property (the location of the video
file) and it will likely accept commands from the system such as “play” and “stop.”

6.6.5 Choosing an Authoring Tool

In the best case, you must be prepared to choose the tool that best fits the job; in the worst case, you must
know which tools will at least “get the job done.” Authoring tools are constantly being improved by their
makers, who add new features and increase performance with upgrade development cycles of six months
to a year. It is important that you study the software product reviews in the blogs and computer trade
journals, as well as talk with current users of these systems, before deciding on the best ones
for your needs. Here’s what to look for:

Editing Features
The elements of multimedia—images, animations, text, digital audio and MIDI music, and
video clips—need to be created, edited, and converted to standard file formats, using the
specialized applications which provide these capabilities. Also, editing tools for these elements,
particularly text and still images, are often included in your authoring system. The more
editors your authoring system has, the fewer specialized tools you may need. In many cases,
however, the editors that may come with an authoring system will offer only a subset of the
substantial features found in dedicated tools. According to Vaughan’s Law of Multimedia
Minimums, these features may very well be sufficient for what you need to do; on the other
hand, if editors you need are missing from your authoring system, or if you require more
power, it’s best to use one of the specialized, single-purpose tools.

Organizing Features
The organization, design, and production process for multimedia involves storyboarding and
flowcharting. Some authoring tools provide a visual flowcharting system or overview facility for
illustrating your project’s structure at a macro level. Storyboards or navigation diagrams can
also help organize a project and can help focus the overall project scope for all involved.
Because designing the interactivity and navigation flow of your project often requires a great
deal of planning and programming effort, your storyboard should describe not just the
graphics of each screen, but the interactive elements as well. Features that help organize
your material are a plus. Many web-authoring programs such as Dreamweaver include tools
that create helpful diagrams and links among the pages of a web site. Planning ahead in an
organized fashion may prevent countless moments of indecision, keep the client from
changing her mind without periodic sign-offs on the materials included, and, in the long run,
save you money.
 Programming Features
Multimedia authoring systems offer one or more of the following
approaches, as explained in the following paragraphs:
■ Visual programming with cues, icons, and objects
■ Programming with a scripting language
■ Programming with traditional languages, such as Basic or C
■ Document development tools
Visual programming with icons or objects is perhaps the simplest and easiest
authoring process. If you want to play a sound or put a picture into your project, just drag
the element’s icon into the playlist—or drag it away to delete it.
Authoring tools that offer a very high level language (VHLL) or interpreted scripting
environment for navigation control and for enabling user inputs or goal-oriented programming
languages—such as Flash, LiveCode, Director, and ToolBook—are more powerful by definition.
The more commands and functions provided in the scripting language, the more powerful the
authoring system. Once you learn a scripting language, you will be able to learn other
scripting languages relatively quickly; the principles are the same, regardless of the command
syntax and keywords used.
As with traditional programming tools, look for an authoring package with good
debugging facilities, robust text editing, and online syntax reference. Other scripting
augmentation facilities are advantageous, as well. In complex projects, you may need to
program custom extensions of the scripting language for direct access to the computer’s
operating system.
A powerful document reference and delivery system is a key component of some
projects. Some authoring tools offer direct importing of preformatted text, indexing facilities,
complex text search mechanisms, and hypertext linkage tools. These authoring systems are
useful for development of CD-ROM information products, online documentation and help
systems, and sophisticated multimedia-enhanced publications.
With scripts, you can perform computational tasks; sense and respond to user input;
create character, icon, and motion animations; launch other applications; and control external
multimedia devices.

Interactivity Features
Interactivity empowers the end users of your project by letting them control the content and
flow of information. Authoring tools should provide one or more levels of interactivity:
■ Simple branching, which offers the ability to go to another section of the multimedia
production (via an activity such as a keypress, mouse click, or expiration of a timer)
■ Conditional branching, which supports a go-to based on the results of IF-THEN
decisions or events
■ A structured language that supports complex programming logic, such as nested IF-
THENs, subroutines, event tracking, and message passing among objects and
elements

Performance Tuning Features

Complex multimedia projects require exact synchronization of events— for example, the
animation of an exploding balloon with its accompanying sound effect. Accomplishing
synchronization is difficult because performance varies widely among the different computers
used for multimedia development and delivery. Some authoring tools allow you to lock a
production’s playback speed to a specified computer platform, but others provide no ability
whatsoever to control performance on various systems. In many cases, you will need to use
the authoring tool’s own scripting language or custom programming facility to specify timing
and sequence on systems with different (faster or slower) processors. Be sure your authoring
system allows precise timing of events.

Playback Features
As you build your multimedia project, you will be continually assembling elements and testing
to see how the assembly looks and performs. Your authoring system should let you build a
segment or part of your project and then quickly test it as if the user were actually using it.
You should spend a great deal of time going back and forth between building and testing as
you refine and smooth the content and timing of the project. You may even want to release
the project to others who you trust to run it
ragged and show you its weak points.

Delivery Features
Delivering your project may require building a run-time version of the project using the
multimedia authoring software. A run-time version or standalone allows your project to play
back without requiring the full authoring software and all its tools and editors. Often, the run-
time version does not allow users to
access or change the content, structure, and programming of the project. If you are going to
distribute your project widely, you should distribute it in the run-time version. Make sure your
authored project can be easily distributed.

Cross-Platform Features
It is also increasingly important to use tools that make transfer across platforms easy.
For many developers, the Macintosh remains the multimedia authoring platform of choice, but
80 percent of that developer’s target market may be Windows platforms. If you develop on a
Macintosh, look for tools that provide a compatible authoring system for Windows or offer a
run-time player for the other platform.

Internet Playability
Because the Web has become a significant delivery medium for multimedia, authoring
systems typically provide a means to convert their output so that it can be delivered within
the context of HTML or DHTML, either with special plug-ins or by embedding Java,
JavaScript, or other code structures in the HTML document. Test your authoring software for
Internet delivery before you build your project. Be sure it performs on the Web as you expect!
Test it out for performance stability on as many platforms as you can.

CHAPTER 6 REVIEW

Chapter Summary ■ Hardware elements such as hard disks and

networked peripherals must be connected
For your review, here’s a summary of the together.
important concepts discussed in this chapter. ■ Memory and storage devices include hard
drives, random access memory (RAM), read-
Describe the four primary stages in a only
multimedia project memory (ROM), flash memory and thumb
drives, and CD-ROM, DVD, and Blu-ray discs.
■ Planning and costing ■ Input and output devices such as
■ Designing and producing microphones, recorders, speakers, and
■ Testing monitors are required
when working with multimedia elements.
■ Delivering
Understand common software programs used
Discuss the intangible elements needed to
to handle text, graphics, audio, video, and
make good multimedia
animation in multimedia projects and discuss
■ Creativity their capabilities
■ Organization ■ A word processor is a regularly used tool in
■ Communication skill designing and building a multimedia project.
■ Image-editing software: bitmapped images
Discuss the hardware most often used in provide the greatest choice and power to the
making multimedia and choose an appropriate artist
platform for rendering fine detail and effects.
for a project
■ Animations and digital video movies are
■ Windows and Macintosh are the two sequences of bitmapped graphic scenes or
computer platforms most often used. frames, rapidly
played back.
 ■ With proper editing software, you can Determine which multimedia authoring system
digitize video, edit, add special effects and is most appropriate for any given project
titles, mix sound ■ Three metaphors are used by authoring
tracks, and save the clip. tools that make multimedia: card- and page-
■ To master an application, you may have based, icon- and
spent many hours learning it, and you will object-based, and time-based.
likely stay ■ When choosing an authoring system,
with that product rather than change to consider its editing, organizing, programming,
another. interactivity,
performance, playback, cross-platform, and
delivery features.

Key-Term Quiz

1. _______________ is a simple, working example that demonstrates whether or not an idea is

feasible.
2. _______________ file requires no cross-platform conversion.
3. FAQ stands for _______________.
4. A package of software applications that might include a spreadsheet, database, e-mail, web
browser, and presentation applications is called _______________ (two words).
5. A program that changes an image from one type of graphics file to another is _______________
(two words).
6. A network of workstations located within a short distance of one another that allows direct
communication and sharing of peripheral resources such as file servers, printers, scanners, and
network modems is called _______________.
7. The type of memory used by a computer to run several programs at the same time is called
_______________.
8. The type of memory that is not erased when power is shut off to it is called _______________.
9. Elements and events are organized along a timeline in _________________ (two words) authoring
system.
10. Each graphic scene in an animation is referred to as _______________.

Multiple-Choice Quiz

1. As you design and build a multimedia project, your most often used tool may be your:
a. word processor
b. authoring system
c. image processor
d. drawing program
e. format converter

2. Of all the multimedia elements in a project, the one that will likely have the greatest influence on
the end user is the:
a. video footage
b. sound effects
c. graphical impact
d. packaging
e. musical background

3. Painting software is dedicated to producing:

a. vector images
b. animations
c. 3-D images
d. bitmap images
e. video clips

4. DVD stands for:

a. Dynamically-Variable Disc
b. Distributed Video Disc
c. Data-Vision Disc
d. Double-Volume Disc
e. Digital Versatile Disc
5. When you turn off the power to this type of storage, any data stored in it is lost.
a. CD-ROM
b. ROM
c. OROM
d. EPROM
e. RAM

6. A barcode reader can:

a. scan graphics into a computer
b. read Universal Product Code patterns
c. provides pressure-sensitive input
d. recognizes spoken words when trained
e. all of the above

7. Which of these is not a common platform for producing and delivering multimedia projects?
a. Macintosh OS X
b. Windows 98
c. Macintosh Classic
d. Windows XP
e. IBM VMS

8. A scripting language is considered:

a. a very low-level language (VLLL)
b. an assembler language
c. a subset of HTML
d. a form of BASIC
e. a very high-level language (VHLL)

9. For a project whose content consists of elements that can be viewed individually, this type of
authoring system is particularly useful during development.
a. card- or page-based tool
b. icon-based, event-driven tool
c. time-based tool
d. scripting language
e. All are equally useful.

10. Scripting languages operate by processing small blocks of code when certain events occur. Such a
block of code is called:
a. a function
b. a handler
c. a process
d. a script
e. a protocol
11. Most card-based programs have a layer that stays constant behind a layer above it that can be
different on all other cards. This layer is called the:
a. master layer
b. system layer
c. prime layer
d. background layer
e. static layer

12. In multimedia authoring systems, multimedia elements and events are often treated as objects
that exist in a hierarchical relationship. This relationship is often called:
a. servant and master
b. host and client
c. property and modifier
d. creator and creature
e. parent and child

13. Which of the following is not a stage of multimedia production?

a. testing
b. planning and costing
c. designing and producing
d. marketing
e. delivering

14. Which of these is not a problem you might encounter in porting a program from a Mac to
the PC (or from the PC to Mac)?
a. Bitmapped images are larger on a PC.
b. Font sizes and shapes are slightly different.
c. Special characters are not the same.
d. Graphics with 256 colors show different colors.
e. All are potential problems.

15. The most precious asset you can bring to the multimedia workshop is your:
a. creativity
b. programming skill
c. musical ability
d. film and video production talent
e. checking account

Essay-Quiz

1. Consider your own skills, abilities, and goals. Where do you see yourself fitting into a
multimedia production team? What abilities would you bring to a team now? What abilities do
you need to work to develop? What are your creative abilities? What is your level of mastery of
multimedia tools (software and hardware)?

2. List the various methods of connecting a computer with the “world,” and discuss the benefits
and drawbacks of each.

Laboratory 6.1

▪ Describe the software that you are using in your multimedia project when you are in high
school or even right now. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Please add an image
or icon to illustrate the software.

(To those who do not have any experience in video editing just look up on the internet a software
that you think will be the best platform to use in multimedia. Also state the advantages and
disadvantages compare on other software.)