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Multimedia Authoring Tools

Software tools

Nowadays small multimedia features are included in all desktop software that you can use to create documents.

The software in your multimedia toolkit and your skill at using it determine what kind of multimedia work you can do and how fine and fancy you can render it.

Making good multimedia means picking the right route through the software swamp.

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Elemental Tools

Elemental tools help us work with the important basic elements of your project: its graphics, images, sound, text and moving pictures.

Elemental tools includes:

Painting And Drawing Tools

Cad And 3-D Drawing Tools

Image Editing Tools

OCR Software

Sound Editing Programs

Tools For Creating Animations And Digital Movies

Helpful Accessories

Painting And Drawing Tools Painting and drawing tools are the most

important items in your toolkit because the impact of the graphics in your project will likely have the greatest influence on the end user.

Painting software is dedicated to producing excellent bitmapped images .

Drawing software is dedicated to producing line art that is easily printed to paper. Drawing packages include powerful and expensive computer-aided design (CAD) software.

Ex: Illustrator, Photoshop, Designer

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CAD And 3-D Drawing Tools

‍CAD (computer-aided design) is a software used by architects, engineers, drafters, artists and others to create precision drawings or technical illustrations. It can be used to create two-dimensional (2-D) drawings or three dimensional modules. The CAD images can spin about in space, with lighting conditions exactly simulated and shadows properly drawn. With CAD software you can stand in front of your work and view it from any angle, making judgments about its design.

Ex: AutoCAD

Image Editing Tools

Image editing applications are

specialized and powerful tools for

enhancing and retouching existing

bitmapped images. These

programs are also indispensable

for rendering images used in

multimedia presentations. Modern

versions of these programs 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,

digital cameras or artwork files

created by painting or drawing

packages.

Ex: Photoshop

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OCR Software Often you will have printed

matter and other text to incorporate into your project, but no electronic text file. With Optical Character Recognition

(OCR) software, a flat-bed scanner and your computer you can save many hours of typing printed words and get the job done faster and more accurately.

Ex: Omnipage

Sound Editing Programs Sound editing tools for both

digitized and MIDI sound let you see music as well as hear it. By drawing the representation of the sound in a waveform, you can cut, copy, paste and edit segments of the sound with great precision and making your own sound effects.

Using editing tools to make your own MIDI files requires knowing about keys, notations and instruments and you will need a MIDI synthesizer or device connected to the computer.

Ex: Audacity

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Tools For Creating Animations And Digital Movies

Animations and digital movies are sequences of bitmapped graphic scenes (frames), rapidly played back. But animations can also be made within an authoring system by rapidly changing the location of objects to generate an appearance of motion.

Movie-making tools let you edit and assemble video clips captured from camera, animations, scanned images, other digitized movie segments. The completed clip, often with added transition and visual effects can be played back.

Ex: Flash, Premiere

Helpful Accessories

No multimedia toolkit is complete

without a few indispensable

utilities to perform some odd,

but repeated tasks. These are

the accessories. For example a

screen-grabber is essential,

because bitmap images are so

common in multimedia, it is

important to have a tool for

grabbing all or part of the

screen display so you can

import it into your authoring

system or copy it into an image

editing application.

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Making Instant Multimedia

There is no reason to buy a dedicated multimedia authoring software if your current software can do the job.

You can save both time and money: professional software usually takes long time to master.

Common desktop presentation tools have become multimedia powerful, while dedicated multimedia authoring systems are offering simplified, easy-to-use versions.

You need special software and hardware tools only if you want to create your multimedia elements from a scratch.

Linking Multimedia Objects

The elements of multimedia are often treated as discrete objects that have particular characteristics or properties.

With objects described in a common format using object-oriented programming systems, elements can be dynamically linked among applications and documents or even embedded to them.

All modern O/S’s support object-oriented approach.

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Presentation Tools

Presentation software (such as Microsoft Powerpoint) might be considered multimedia authoring software.

The line between multimedia authoring and desktop presentation software is a wide gray area.

Presentation tools add syncronized audio, self-running animations, and video to the slide show presentation.

Multimedia Authoring Software

The ”real” 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

presenting your project on screen

assembling multimedia elements into a single project

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Multimedia Authoring Software

Authoring systems typically include the ability to

- create, edit, and import specific types of data;

- assemble raw data in to a playback sequence;

- provide a structured method or language for responding to user input.

Applications

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.

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Types of Authoring Tools

Card- or page-based tools: elements are organized as pages of a book or a stack of cards.

Icon-based, event-driven tools: elements and interaction cues (events) are organized as objects in a structural framework or process.

Time-based tools: elements and events are organized along a timeline. Time-based tools are best to use when you have a message with a beginning and an end.

Card- or Page-based Tools

In these authoring systems, elements are organized as pages of a book or stack of cards. The authoring system lets you link these pages or cards into organized sequence and they also allow you to play sound elements and launch animations and digital videos.

Page-based authoring systems are object-oriented: the objects are the buttons, graphics and etc. Each object may contain a programming script activated when an event related to that object occurs.

EX: Visual Basic, Toolbook

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Icon-based Authoring Tools

Icon-based, event-driven tools provide a visual programming approach to organizing and presenting multimedia. First you build the flowchart of events, tasks and decisions by using appropriate icons from a library. These icons can include menu choices, graphic images and sounds. When the flowchart is built, you can add your content: text, graphics, animations, sounds and video movies.

EX: Authoware Professional

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Authorware Icons

Display

Motion

Erase

Wait

Framework

Decision

Interaction

Calculation

Map

Digital Movie

Navigate Sound

DVD

Knowledge Object

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Time-based Authoring Tools

Time-based authoring tools are the most common of

multimedia authoring tools. In these authoring systems,

elements are organized along a time line. They are the best

to use when you have message with the beginning and an

end. Sequentially organized graphic frames are played

back at the speed that you can set. Other elements (such as

audio events) are triggered at the given time or location in

the sequence of events.

EX: Director, Flash

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Editing and Organizing Features

The elements of multimedia need to be created, edited and converted to standard file formats.

Editing can be done either using special applications or using editing tools that are included in your authoring system.

The organization, design, and production process for multimedia involves storyboarding and flowcharting.

Some authoring tools provide a visual flowcharting system or overview facility.

Your storyboard should describe not only the graphics on each screen, but the interactive elements as well.

Programming Features

Multimedia authoring systems offer one or more of the following:

Visual programming with cues, icons and objects

Programming with scripting language

programming with traditional languages, such as Basic or C

Document development tools

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Programming Features

Visual programming with icons or objects is simple and easy, but it’s often a bit restricted approach.

Authoring tools that offer a very high level language or interpreted scripting environment for navigation control and for enabling user inputs are more powerful.

Learn one scripting language and you learn them all: the principles are the same, regardless of the command syntax and keywords used.

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 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 etc.

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Other Features

Performance tuning; exact synchronization of events.

Playback; build a segment or part of the project and test it immediately.

Delivery; building a run-time version of the project.

Cross-Platform; tools that make transfer across platforms easy.

Internet Playability; convert the output so that it can be delivered within the context of HTML, DHTML, either with plug-ins or without them.

Authoring versus Programming

There is no hard-and-fast rule about what constitutes authoring as distinct from programming.

Multimedia products can be created with authoring tools such as Flash, but you can do the same with Java and C++.

In general the versatility and performance of your application will increase as you move towards a full-blown programming language such as C++, but it will be more difficult to implement.

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The Authoring Tree

A good graphical authoring software or structure editor will include a scripting language, and a good language will allow you to build new commands with a low-level language such as C.

The low-level language could call routines in machine code for speed.

Machine code written as part of an application is common in games but much less so in multimedia.

The Authoring Tree

Graphical structure editor

Scripting language

Extensions in C

Machine code

Ease

of

use

Flexibility

and

speed

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Stages

A strict software-oriented development cycle might not be followed, or indeed be appropriate, for multimedia productions.

Some clients will expect some of the more formal elements of software design.

One common software approach is to write a user requirements document and a functional specification. (The proposal to the client may well have covered some aspects of this.)

User Requirements

Two meanings:

”What are the needs of the user that the application can satisfy?”

Like the ability to write and manipulate text with word processor.

This kind of information follows from the scoping of the project when the needs and objectives of the user are determined.

”What does the user require of the application?”

Answers are things such as ”user-friendly interface”, ”spell checking”.

Demands a strict user requirements list that should be used as the holy bible for the project.

You might consider including both in the software process.

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Functional Specification

Functional specification gives more detail about how a task will be carried out.

At its fullest a functional specification will list the outcome of every action carried out by the user, and will say how that is to be achieved.

Bugs

The reliability of complex systems decreases geometrically with the number of component parts.

Program’s reliability can be defined as correct operation under all conditions.

Things the user is not supposed to do should be catered during software development.

”There is always one more bug.”

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The Jigsaw

Software programming is becoming more and more like a mix-and-match jigsaw puzzle. Programs are made up of objects that interact with each other and can be reused in other applications.

Three main sections

…that need to be fitted together: The user interface is the means by which the

user controls the program.

The program logic runs behind the user interface and carries out the tasks that the user interface requests, and will possibly have an agenda of its own, if, for example, the application includes any simulations.

The assets are the textual, graphical and audiovisual components of the program that the program logic will choose and activate, usually on the instructions of the user interface.

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The Jigsaw

Even if the application does not easily break down into these three sections, there are reasons why you might wish to separate from a logical point of view.

The Jigsaw

The user interface may run remotely from the core program logic in a networked application.

Assets will need to be proofread or otherwise checked (debugging).

Program logic is less platform dependent than the user interface and so is easier to port from one platform to another.

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Summary

Choosing the right software package, programming language or authoring system is the key question.

Desktop software are becoming more multimedia powerful.

The software development in multimedia is likely to be the least understood part of the process for a client.