Chapter 8: Multimedia Authoring Tools

1. Chapter 8: Multimedia Authoring Tools

2. Overview • Stages of a multimedia project • What You Need: The Intangibles • What You Need: Hardware • What You Need: Software • What You Need: Authoring Systems

3. What You Need: Software • Text editing and word processing tools • Word processors such as Microsoft Word andWordPerfect are powerful applications that includespell checkers, table formatters, thesauruses, and prebuilt templates for letters, résumés,purchase orders, and other common documents. • OpenOffice is a free, downloadable word processing program.

4. What You Need: Software (continued) • OCR software • Converts bitmapped characters into electronically recognizable ASCII text. • Makes use of probability and expert system algorithms. • Is very accurate and saves time and effort.

5. What You Need: Software (continued) • Painting tools allow you to create and modify bitmap images. • PhotoShop, Fireworks, and Painter are examples. • Bitmapped images provide the greatest choice and power for rendering fine detail and effects.

6. What You Need: Software (continued) • Drawing tools allow you to create and modify vector graphics. • CorelDraw, Illustrator, and Canvas are examples. • Vector graphics are used by Adobe Flash to reduce download time and scaling problems with web graphics. • Many authoring systems can only import bitmap graphics.

7. What You Need: Software (continued) • Painting and drawing software featuresinclude: • An intuitive graphical user interface • Scalable dimensions • Multiple undo capability • Scalable text font support • Support for third-party special effect plug-ins • Layering capability

8. What You Need: Software (continued) • Painting and drawing software featuresinclude (continued) • Painting features such as smoothing coarse-edged objects into the background with anti-aliasing.

9. What You Need: Software (continued) • 3-D modeling tools allow rendering of objects in a three-dimensional perspective. • VectorWorks, AutoDesk Maya, and Strata 3D are examples. • Many applications allow you to export and save moving images as QuickTime or AVI animation files. • 3-D graphics usually take a long time to render, so plan accordingly.

10. What You Need: Software (continued) • 3-D modeling tools allow rendering of objects in a three-dimensional perspective.

11. What You Need: Software (continued) • 3-D modeling software features include: • Good color and palette management • Multiple dimension windows and unlimited cameras • Lathe and extrude features • Ability to drag and drop primitive shapes, sculpt organic objects • Color and texture mapping

12. What You Need: Software (continued) • Image-editing tools • Are specialized and powerful tools for enhancing and retouching existing bitmapped images. • Many painting and drawing programs also serve as image editors. • Features include conversion of image-data types and file formats, masking features, employment of virtual memory scheme, etc. • Support third-party plug-ins.

13. What You Need: Software (continued) • Sound-editing tools • Enables the user to see music as a waveform as well as hear sound. • This is done by drawing a representation of sound in fine increments.

14. What You Need: Software (continued) • Animation, video, and digital movie tools • Animation is a sequence of bitmapped graphic scenes or frames, rapidly played back. • Animations can be made within some authoring systems by moving objects or sprites to simulate motion. • Moviemaking tools take advantage of QuickTime and AVI formats to create, edit, and present digitized motion video segments.

15. What You Need: Software (continued) • Helpful accessories • Screen-capture software enables the user to move bitmapped images by placing them on the clipboard. • Format converters are useful for projects where the source material originates on different platforms.

16. What You Need: Authoring Systems • Multimedia authoring tools provide the framework for organizing and editing the elements of a multimedia project. • Authoring software provides an integrated environment for combining the content and functions of a project. • It enables the developer to create, edit, and import data.

17. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Helpful ways to get started: • Use pre-made templates, wizards, and styles to save time on page setup. • Improve document appearance with tables, bulleted and numbered lists, and symbols.

18. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Helpful ways to get started (continued): • Help readers find information with tables ofcontents, running headers and footers, andindexes. • Use quick-change, spelling, and grammar checkerfeatures. • Include identifying information in the filename.

19. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Making instant multimedia • The scope of your project determines theappropriate production tool. • Modern office productivity software can performmany simple multimedia tasks. • Most modern PCs have some multimedia creationtools built in.

20. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) Most word processing programs allow you to include various image formats, movies, and digitized sounds (including voice annotations).

21. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) Spreadsheets can include embedded objects made with other applications.

22. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) A FileMaker Pro employee database can include image and sound resources.

23. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) Microsoft PowerPoint provides multimedia linking and embedding features.

24. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Types of authoring tools • Card- and page-based authoring tools • Icon- and object-based authoring tools • Time-based authoring tools

25. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Card- and page-based authoring tools • Elements are arranged like pages of a book or cards in a stack. • These tools contain media objects such as buttons, text fields, and graphic objects. • Runtime Revolution and ToolBook are examples of page-based systems.

26. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Card- and page-based authoring tools (continued) • Characteristics of objects are defined by properties. • Objects may contain scripts that specify a related action. • One or more intermediate files are usually required for handling script actions and routines. • Cards or pages can contain multiple layers.

27. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Icon- and object-based authoring tools • Icon-based and object-based tools provide a visual programming approach to organizing and presenting multimedia. • Multimedia elements and interaction cues are organized as objects in a flowchart. • Flowcharts can be built by dragging appropriate icons from a library, and then adding the content.

28. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Time-based authoring tools • Time-based tools are best suited for messages with a beginning and an end. • Adobe’s Flash and Director are time-based development environments.

29. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Time-based authoring tools (continued) • Adobe Flash • Flash is used for delivering rich multimedia content to the Web. • It allows the creation of simple static HTML pages with the Flash Player plug-in.

30. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Time-based authoring tools (continued) • Adobe Director • A multimedia database, “Cast,” contains still images, sound files, text, shapes, scripts, movies, and other Director files. • Score is a sequencer for displaying, animating, and playing Cast members. • Lingo is an object-oriented scripting language that enables interactivity and programmed control.

31. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Objects • Authoring tools generally treat multimediaelements as objects. • Objects exist in a hierarchical order of parent andchild relationships. • Each object is assigned properties and modifiers. • On receiving messages, objects perform tasksdepending on the properties and modifiers.

32. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Choosing an authoring tool • Editing and organizing features • Programming features • Interactivity features • Performance tuning and playback features • Delivery, cross-platform, and Internet playability features

33. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Editing and organizing features • Authoring systems include editing tools to create, edit, and convert multimedia elements such as animation and video clips. • The organization, design, and production process for multimedia involves storyboarding and flowcharting. • Visual flowcharting or an overview facility illustrates project structure at a macro level.

34. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Programming features • Visual programming with icons or objects is the simplest and easiest authoring process. • Authoring tools offer “very high level language” (VHLL) or interpreted scripting environment.

35. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Interactivity features • Interactivity gives the end user control over the content and flow of information in a project. • Simple branching is the ability to go to another section of the multimedia production.

36. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Interactivity features (continued) • Conditional branching is an activity based on the results of IF-THEN decisions or events. • Structured language supports complex programming logic, subroutines, event tracking, and message passing among objects and elements.

37. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Performance-tuning and playback features • Achieving synchronization is difficult, considering that performance of the different computers used for multimedia development and delivery varies. • Authoring system should facilitate precise timing of events. • These features should enable developers to build part of a project and then test it immediately.

38. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Delivery features • Delivering the project may require building a run-time version of the project, using the multimedia authoring software. • A run-time or standalone version allows a project to play back without the complete authoring software and all its tools and editors.

39. What You Need: Authoring Systems (continued) • Cross-platform and Internet-playability features • It is important to use tools that facilitate easy transfer across platforms. • Authoring systems provide a means for converting their output to be delivered within the context of HTML or DHTML.

40. Summary • The basic stages of a multimedia project are planning and costing, design and production, and testing and delivery. • Knowledge of hardware and software, as well as creativity and organizational skills, are essential for creating a high-quality multimedia project.

41. Summary (continued) • Multimedia authoring tools provide the framework needed for organizing and editing multimedia elements in a project. • The three types of authoring tools are card- or page-based, icon-based or event-driven, and time-based.

42. Summary (continued) • Choose an authoring tool based on editing, organizing, programming, interactivity, performance-tuning, playback, delivery, cross-platform, and Internet playability features.