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| Multimedia Authoring |
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Beyond The Basics February 1999 • Vol.10 Issue 2 |
Multimedia Authoring It's Not Just For Experts Anymore | ||
 You're browsing to your favorite site on the World Wide Web, and as it opens, you notice something has changed. Actually, many things have. There's a new background color dripping onto your screen. Animated images catch your eye as they pop to life, while sound leaps from the page and into and out of your speakers. You click once, twice, and now you're part of the multimedia experience. Your clicks cause the animations to flare and the sounds to erupt. You'll definitely be back to this site. This is a simple example of how multimedia authoring affects our lives as computer users every day. It used to be that multimedia authoring tools were for the elite: professional programmers who created multi-faceted slide shows and sideshows for their corporation's hired actors to take out and use for drumming up sales, marketing clout, and revenue. With the advent of the Web, you don't have to be a pocket-protector-wearing member of the digirati to use multimedia authoring. Some of the tools are still extremely advanced, but anyone who has enough know-how to create a Web site can easily expand their skills enough to making a full-blown multimedia presentation. We'll talk about the types of presentations you can make, cover the obvious and not so obvious forums for your presentations, and look at the tools available for multimedia authoring.  What Is Multimedia Authoring? Using an audio- and video-laden presentation has always been an effective method of making your point. If we can see it and hear it, it can affect us. But if we can interact with the presentation in some manner, we have a much greater chance of remembering the information. That's what the authoring aspect of multimedia authoring is all about. Creating a memorable Web site or presentation is more than just slapping a couple of .WAV sound files on top of some lackluster images and calling it multimedia. It has to be something the user (the audience) can become involved in. Doug Dixon, a technology leader at Sarnoff Corp., defines multimedia as "typically at least something visual plus auditory plus interactivity." The sights and sounds are obvious, but adding the interactivity is a bit trickier. "That's the way people regard it now," he says. "In the old days, multimedia was a slide show if you hummed along to it. People can still do it step by step, but now it requires some interaction." This multimedia interactivity can be something simple, such as a click-through slide show with a soundtrack, or much more complicated, such as something involving images, two-dimensional (2-D) animation, video, three-dimensional (3-D) graphics, and and synthesized sound and music, Dixon says. They Call It Multimedia For A Reason We'll get more into the interactivity in a bit, but let's focus first on the easier part: the multimedia. We've already established that this usually means something auditory combined with something visual, but there are many ways to do this. On the visual side, you can have static images or panoramic vistas, linked groups of images, and even virtual worlds of 3-D graphical rendering. Video clips (which you can create digitally or import from your camcorder or VCR) and animation also add much to the visual (although they also add file-size constraints you must consider if you're using video on a Web site or placing it on a CD-ROM). You also can integrate sound effects, recorded quotes, music, and other auditory inputs within the visuals (the audio track that runs with video, for example) or let them stand alone. And although we rarely give it the same glamour level as other forms of multimedia, text often is the most important part of your presentation. The displayed or spoken words mixed with the sounds and images are the heart of the presentation, and you'll want to consider their impact. Different fonts, text styles and sizes, and word placement will affect how easy to read and how memorable your information will be. Involve The Viewer The best way to make involving presentations is to focus on creating events that stimulate our senses in the same manner as real-world events. For example, a division of Dixon's Sarnoff Corp., VideoBrush, uses Video Mosaic technology to let users create a totally interactive panoramic image. "Video and image mosaics provide a whole new way to enhance multimedia presentations by allowing the user to really see and understand the scene or environment you are trying to present," Dixon says. "Providing full 360-degree panoramas, which the viewer can interactively explore, makes the experience much more real."
The Valley Forge Military Academy & College (http://www.vfmac.edu) uses this technology to create a virtual tour of its campus. As the user pans past campus buildings he or she may want more information about, the user can click a specific site and open up a panoramic image of the inside of that building or another Web page with further information. So, apart from just having users click through standard hyperlinks, there are many other ways for them to interact. Animation games are another example of a quick-and-easy way of making people remember your site. Thumbnailing images (images displayed at a fraction of their normal size) get users to take the initiative and click pictures they want to see larger, as well as reducing your page's load time. Navigational maps and graphical menus that help users immediately find what they're looking for are another example. You have a number of ways to make your presentations interactive; just make sure the authoring tools you're considering are up to the task. Uses & Tools All this multimedia may be entertaining, but the key point is how it can help advance your business. Multimedia is used for more than just presentations (although that has always been a big part and will likely remain so). It's also useful for marketing, sales, education, employee training, information kiosks, entertainment, and Web sites, Dixon says. Pretty much anywhere you can use images and sounds together (coupled with a dash of interaction, of course), there's a use for multimedia authoring. Multimedia authors come from all areas. "At the high end, there are the creative departments in business. The ones that handle the training and the Web sites," Dixon says. At the other end, "there's the individuals creating business presentations and students building panoramas and simple animations for their Web sites." When you're ready to start your multimedia ventures, Andy Oeftering, a multimedia course director at Data-Tech Institute (http://www.datatech.com), says choosing the right tool is the most important step. "The authoring tool that you use defines the capabilities and limits of your presentations, so choose wisely," he says. There are three types of authoring tools, which are divided by the style in which the multimedia presentation is created. Card-based. Sort of like creating notecards for a speech or the standard slide show analogy, card-based authoring tools let you organize the content of your presentation into individual cards or pages. Oeftering says the advantage of card-based programs is their short learning curve. "It's no exaggeration to say you can begin creating multimedia in minutes." But the downside is the difficulty of running media concurrently, he says, since an audio clip must begin and end before another media event can occur. Time-based. Oeftering's metaphor for time-based authoring tools is a reel of film or a multi-track videotape recorder. Tools in this category, such as Macromedia's Director (see below), let you represent your multimedia content along tracks that stretch across individual frames, making it easier to run concurrent media, although also more difficult to use. Icon-based. Built like a flowchart, icon-based authoring tools let you drag icons from a toolbar to a blank page, Oeftering says. Then, you just double-click an icon, and dialog boxes help you link multimedia activity. These often-expensive programs (up to $5,000) are for applications that rely on interactivity, such as public kiosks (for example, as the wedding registry machines you see in department stores). Once you settle on a specific style of tool, you need to address many other considerations. "You need to think about what kind of media is supported, what kind of formats are supported for each media, and what kind of tools, such as audio and video editors, are built in," Dixon says . And, of course, you need to look at the interaction. If you're looking to create multimedia presentations that contain video clips, you want to make sure your tools support this. The same applies for audio, animation, panoramic images, and other forms of media you're planning to include. You'll also want to consider how well the authoring tool integrates all these types of media. After all, you want your presentation to be multimedia. That's the point of authoring tools, Dixon says. "They allow you to prepare the material, arrange its presentation in timelines, coordinate and synchronize the different materials, and provide transitions and effects between them."
The Products Here's a look at several multimedia authoring tools available from the low to the high end. Macromedia Director. The latest version of the quintessential multimedia authoring tool is Director 6.5 ($99, 800/457-1774, 800/470-7211, http://www.macromedia.com). This tool is in the time-based format, and the programmers use the playwright analogy to its fullest. Your design space is the Stage (with individual Frames), with a complete Cast of media characters to choose from. The Score determines how long your presentation will last. Director 6.5 also comes with Extreme 3D (for 3-D graphics editing), Sound Forge XP (for audio production), and xRes (for image editing). Director is cross-platform, letting you design on either a Windows or Macintosh machine and then play back your multimedia presentations on either machine. You can publish directly to the Internet (creating Shockwave animated content is one of the more popular uses for Director), as well as create hybrid CDs that combine your multimedia CD with Internet content. Director is a fairly difficult (and still rather expensive, although the price has dropped considerably) option for multimedia authoring. But this is due, of course, to its power. It supports almost every media format, from graphics to streaming audio and video (so the content "streams" to a user's PC and they don't have to download it all at once) to animation to Java. At Macromedia's Web site you can sign up for a free Showcase CD, which comes with an evaluation version of Director. This version is fully functional, but lacks a save option. You'll need Windows 9x or NT to run Director, although you can play back your creations on almost any system, including Windows 3.x and Macintosh. These creations are called projectors and are self-running (meaning your clients or users won't need to have any type of player to run them). If you're looking to do some hard-core multimedia authoring, this is the obvious tool for you. Ulead VideoStudio. On the other end of the price spectrum is Ulead's VideoStudio ($99.95, 800/858-5323, 310/523-9393, http://www.ulead.com). The current version (3.0) costs less than $100 and is a great way to introduce yourself to the world of multimedia authoring. As its title suggests, VideoStudio is primarily for video editing on your PC. It's also geared toward the beginning multimedia author, as its video wizard will walk you through your first productions. VideoStudio comes with an array of built-in video effects, such as different scene transitions (you can simply fade out and back in or flip the screen from one scene to another—very "Wonder Woman!"), and titles for scenes and the whole movie.
You can use two formats for your video creations: the standard step-by-step Storyboard (with the wizard) or the Timeline view (time-based like Director). You have several options for publishing your video. You can record it to videotape (with the appropriate hardware, see sidebar) or save it on a CD (with a CD-Recordable drive). You can save it in digital format, such as audiovisual interleaving (AVI) and and then post it to a Web page or send it via E-mail. You also can save it as streaming media in Microsoft's NetShow (ASF) format and Real-Networks Real Media (RM) format. Finally, VideoStudio lets you create multimedia greeting cards, self-running files that contain video and audio clips for birthday or other greetings. VideoStudio, available for Windows 9x and NT isn't the most powerful multimedia authoring tool out there, but it won't put you into debt, and it's a great way to get started with video editing. VideoBrush Panorama. A less expensive option (and even more media-specific) is Video-Brush's Panorama ($59.95, 888/749-3678, 805/566-0030, http://www.videobrush .com). This program lets you create interactive panoramic images from video input.
Images you create are completely interactive—users can set up the image to slowly pan over the image. With the latest version of Panorama (2.0), you also can save images in Apple QuickTime (VR) format. You can save panoramic images in a JPEG format, making them small enough to send over the Internet and load from Web pages in a short amount of time. You can download a demo version of Panorama from VideoBrush's Web site, so you can try it out before you buy it. Panorama is for Windows 9x and NT, but it isn't very powerful. What it does, however, it does well. Multimedia authoring isn't just for advanced users anymore, but if you become expert at using it, you'll be able to create the perfect presentation to fulfill almost any need you can think of.  by Joel Strauch
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