Multimedia authoring

Multimedia authoring

What is multimedia authoring? • Multimedia authoring integrates a variety of media, including images, sound, and video along with animation and interactivity. • The purposes for working in multimedia authoring range from the commercial to the personal to the purely artistic. • The means of distribution vary—CD, DVD, web, email, television, movies. • And the languages and environments vary, from all-purpose programming languages like Java to full-featured authoring environments like Adobe Director and Flash with accompanying scripting languages.

What is multimedia authoring?(2) • The result of multimedia authoring can go by a number of names—production, animation, movie, or even simply program, if you’re referring to the implementation itself. • You might use a multimedia authoring environment to create a digital résumé or portfolio, an advertisement, a cartoon animation, a tutorial DVD, a special effects portion of a movie, or an interactive visual poem for personal expression. • You may choose to work with vector graphics, bitmap images, or a combination of these. You may include video, digital audio, or MIDI. You may work in 2D or 3D. You may allow user interactivity.

Criteria for Evaluating Multimedia Authoring Environments - Work process • What are the main steps when you create an animation or movie in your chosen language or environment? Is it all programming? • Will you create pictures, sounds, and movies first and import them into your programming environment, or will you create everything from scratch within the programming environment itself? • Do you use drag-and-drop programming with built-in behaviors, or do you program everything from scratch? • What elements are already created for you and ready for use? Extensive class libraries? Built-in objects or behaviors? Built-in GUI (graphical user interface) objects like buttons and text boxes? Events that will automatically generate handler calls?

Media supported • How easy or difficult is it to incorporate the media that are most important to your production? • Does your language easily support bitmap images? Vector graphics? Digital sound? MIDI? Digital video? Interactivity? 3D?

Ease of programming • Have you ever used this language before? • What is the programming environment for the language? Is there a user-friendly GUI? An IDE (integrated development environment)? • Some multimedia languages are based upon a kind of metaphor. For example, Adobe Director has a very visual programming environment, using the metaphor of a stage and cast members. • Flash’s programming environment resembles a drawing surface, with different pieces of transparent acetate laid one on top of the other.

Programming paradigm • Is this an all-purpose programming language, with full computational power? • Is it a scripting language? • Does it support object-oriented programming? • Is it an event-based language? • Is the authoring environment especially designed for a particular purpose—for example, bitmap images, vector graphics, or audio? • Is it an education-oriented language—primarily intended to teach you how to program and get you excited about programming—or is it “industrial strength”?

Extensibility • Can you add features to the language or environment with additional third-party plugins or extras? • Can you write your own extra components?

Efficiency of the language • Some languages are easy to learn, but they execute inefficiently and do not lend themselves to programs that require heavy-duty computation. • Will your chosen language be able to execute fast enough for your purposes? Is it an interpreted or a compiled language? Compiled languages can take advantage of compiler optimizations for faster execution. • Is it important to you to be able to develop your program quickly? Or is it more important that the final product execute quickly? • Does the language give you access at a low enough level of abstraction to allow you to write efficient code?

Cost • Is the language or environment freeware? Shareware? A commercial product? • If it’s a commercial product, how much does it cost? Can you afford it? Is there a trial version? How long can you keep the trial version, and how much functionality does it have?

Language stability • How stable is the language or environment? • Is it standardized? • Is it in a constant state of revisions and additions? • Will it be around in a year or two? • GROUP DISCUSSION: Will Flash be around in a year or two?Five? The next phase of multimedia development?

Memory requirements and Platform • How much RAM and disk space are needed to run the programming environment? Can your computer accommodate these requirements? • What operating system does the language run under?

Distribution means • What options do you have for distributing your multimedia production, in terms of both operating system and distribution media like web, CD, DVD, etc.? • Can you distribute the production in a format that will be accessible to your target audience? • How large are the resulting files?

Comparison of Some Current Multimedia Authoring Environments, Part 1

Language /Level of Abstraction /Style of Progr./Media Supported/Extensibility

Comparison of Some Current Multimedia Authoring Environments, Part 2

Language/ Platform /Distribution /Concurrency / Network Comm.

Distributionmeans • Another important issue in your choice of authoring environment is the format of your end product. • What type of file will you have when you’re finished, given your choice of programming language? • Who are your target end users? • What operating system, browsers, players, and plugins are they most likely to have?

Java • With Java, you have two options: You can write your program as a conventional application program or as an applet. • Java has the additional advantage of being platform independent. Java application programs are compiled into bytecodes. • The bytecodes are standard and can be read, interpreted, and executed on any platform. When they are interpreted by a particular platform, they are compiled into machine instructions specific to that environment. • Applets are handled similarly, except that they execute via a web browser. (As a Java API, the Processing programming environment yields the same type of distribution file types as for standard Java.)

Flash • The native development format is FLA. • Distribution formats are EXE, HQX, SWF, or MOV. • EXE and HQX are stand-alone executables. • A Flash animation published in the SWF format can be embedded in a web page and played via web browsers; need to have the Flash player plugged in, but this is standard. • SWF files can also be integrated into Director. • MOVs are QuickTime movie versions of Flash animations. • Example of a complicated Flash movie

Director/Flashdevelopmentphases • Create your media outside of Director or Flash. • For example, you might take digital photographs, draw some vector graphics, shoot video, and/or record sound. You can create and edit your media in appropriate environments (i.e., Final Cut, Illustrator, Sound Forge, etc.) and then import them into Director or Flash. • A note about bitmap images in Director: Make your images the size you want them to be before you import them into Director. Decide on appropriate file types. (For bitmap images, lossless compression is better.) • For both Director and Flash, create your sound files with appropriate sampling rate and bit depth.

Director/Flashdevelopment phases(2) • Enter the Director or Flash environment. Import the media you created. • Create other media elements directly in the Director or Flash environment. (They have their own vector graphics and/or paint tools, for example.) You’ll probably need text boxes, buttons, etc. • Put objects on the stage (which equivalently puts them in the timeline). • Add user-interface components to the stage, e.g., buttons and input boxes. • Tweenobjects as needed.

Director/Flashdevelopment phases(3) • Set reference points in the timeline as needed. In Director, these are called markers. In Flash, they’re called frame labels. • Create event handlers and attach them to the appropriate objects and frames. • Add built-in behaviors to objects. • Create new behaviors and add them to objects and interface components.

Director/Flashdevelopment phases(4) • Synchronize media as needed. • Embed fonts, plug-ins, and extras as needed for the final product. • Choosecompressionoptions. • Save for distribution.

Flash Authoring interface

Multimedia authoring