Lesson 4 - Developing a Multimedia Project

IT211-Multimedia Systems(Chapter 7)
In this chapter, you will learn how to:
Describe the four primary stages in a multimedia project
Discuss the intangible elements needed to make good multimedia:
creativity, organization, and communication skill
Discuss the hardware most often used in making multimedia and choose
an appropriate platform for a project
Understand common software programs used to handle text, graphics,
audio, video, and animation in multimedia projects and discuss their
capabilities
Determine which multimedia authoring system is most appropriate for any
given project
In this lesson, 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
 Planning and Costing
Designing and Producing
Testing
Delivering
 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 as well as a structure
and a navigational system that will allow the viewer to
visit the messages and content.
Estimate the time youll need to do all the elements, and
then prepare a budget.
 The ease with which you can create materials with
todays 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.
 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.
 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.
 Package and deliver the project to the end user. Be
prepared to follow up over time with tweaks, repairs,
and upgrades.
 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.
 It is very difficult to learn creativity. Some people might
say its impossibleand 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 multimedia, this means you need to know your
hardware and software first. Once youre 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
questionwhich is simply, How creative are you?
 Its 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.
 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 clients
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 costin both time
and moneyof stable and fast networking will be
returned to you.
 Windows vs Macintosh
Connections
Memory and Storage Devices
Input Devices
Output Devices
 Apple Macintosh operating system (OS) and
Microsoft Windows OS.
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 todays
multimedia.
 Detailed and animated multimedia is also created on
specialized workstations from Silicon Graphics, Sun
Microsystems, and even on mainframes.
Regardless of the delivery vehicle for your multimedia
whether its destined to play on a computer, on a Wii,
Xbox, or PlayStation game box, or as bits moving down
the data highwaymost multimedia will probably be
made on a Macintosh or on a PC.
 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
cross-platform 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.
 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.
It doesnt matter where they come from or who makes
them. These components are assembled and branded
by Dell, HP, Sony, and others into computers that run
Windows.
 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 Intels 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.
 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 7-2 shows various device connection methodologies
and their data transfer rates.
 SCSIpronounced 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 computers power supply, and external
devices, which are outside the chassis, use their own
power supply, and are plugged into the computer by
cable.
 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.
 These devices are automatically recognized (plug-and
play) and installed without users needing to install
special cards or turn the computer off and on when
making the connection (allowing hots-wapping).
 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.
 Sony calls this standard i.LINK. FireWire has replaced
Parallel SCSI in many applications because its cheaper
and because it has a simpler, adaptive cabling system.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
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.
 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.
 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).
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.
 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.
 A great variety of input devicesfrom the familiar
keyboard and handy mouse to touchscreens and voice
recognition setupscan 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 todaymostly at
markets, shops, and other point of-purchase locations.
 For hands-free interaction with your project, try voice
recognition system. These behavioral biometric
systems usually provide a unidirectional cardioid, noise-
canceling microphone that automatically filters out
background noise and learns to recognize voiceprints.
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 cameras memory to be uploaded later to a
computer.
 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.
 Speakers
Monitor
Graphic print designers often use special color-
correction hardware to ensure that what they see on
screen matches precisely what will be printed.
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.
 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 teamthese are tools for the
housekeeping tasks that make your creative and
production life easier.
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.
 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.
Examples:
Microsoft Word
WordPerfect
OpenOffice
 Optical Character Recognition 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.
 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.
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 Macromedias 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 sizes
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 (see illustration);
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
 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.
3D modeling software such as VectorWorls, AutoDesks
Maya, Strata 3D, Avids SoftImage, Blender, Google
SketchUp, etc.
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 cameras 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
 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, pixelize,
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
 Sound-editing tools for both digitized and Musical
Instrument Digital Interface(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 precisionsomething
impossible to do in real time (that is, with the music
playing).
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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
 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 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-based or page-based tools are authoring
systems, wherein the elements are organized as pages
of a book or a stack of cards.
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.
 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.
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.
 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.
Example:
Adobe Flash
Adobe Director
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. Heres what to look for:
Editing Features
Organizing Features
Programming Features
Interactivity Features
Performance Tuning Features
Playback Features
Delivery Features
Cross-Platform Features
 The elements of multimediaimages, animations, text,
digital audio, and video clipsneed to be created,
edited, and converted to standard file format.
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.
 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 projects
structure at a macro level.
Many web-authoring programs such as Dreamweaver
include tools that create helpful diagrams and links
among the pages of a web site.
Multimedia authoring systems offer one or more of the
following approaches:
Visual programming with cues, icons, and objects
Programming with a scripting language
Programming with traditional languages, such as Basic or C
Document development tools
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.
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
 Complex multimedia projects require exact
synchronization of events for example, the animation
of an exploding balloon with its accompanying sound
effect.
Some authoring tools allow you to lock a productions
playback speed to a specified computer platform, but
others provide no ability whatsoever to control
performance on various systems.
 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.
 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.
 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 developers
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.