Multimedia Presentation and Authoring

Multimedia Presentation and Authoring
Easy-to-use tools for creating, manipulating, and presenting multimedia content will be an important factor in the utility of multimedia information. The digital representation of multimedia data simplifies many of the problems that have limited the use of analog audio and video editing systems to specialists. Yet interactive nonlinear time-based hypermedia data are still difficult and time-consuming to compose. The most powerful contemporary authoring tools use a programming paradigm to allow complex interaction and synchronisation relationships to be defined. These programming facilities are typically provided through either a scripting language or an iconic visual programming interface. Individual media types are edited using separate media-specific editors. This chapter reviews the common approaches to multimedia authoring and presentation and discusses where future tools might be able to improve on the current tools.
Overview
Authoring and presentation systems are the software programs that allow people to create and deliver an experience for an end user (Figure 1.8). This experience can take many forms, from a computer-based training course to a room-sized presentation or a virtual-reality environment requiring head mounted displays and spatial input gloves. The common denominator across all of these forms is that the experience is an interactive one: The end user interacts with the programs on the computer by providing input (touching a screen, typing on a keyboard, or making a gesture in space, for example), which affects the output from the computer. This chapter surveys recent approaches to multimedia authoring and presentation that allow manipulation of diverse media forms through various modes of interaction.
Authoring software is designed to support the creation of an interact nonlinear experience in the sense that there are several pathways through the material, so the end user can make choices about where to go in presentation, as well as how long to view each screen. The end user's choice frequently referred to as navigating. Authoring software for train frequently supports testing of the end user, maintaining individual and tracking the paths that users take through the material, known courseware. There are often a variety of statistical reporting utilities included for the trainer as well. From a commercial standpoint, authoring system: tend to be more expensive than presentation systems, and often have of price for the full authoring environment plus a per copy or site license for run-time playback-only module for each end-user machine.
Presentation packages are designed to support the same media types, be without support for testing, scorekeeping, or tracking of end users. Sort packages are intended for creation of simple linear presentations, which not offer multiple pathways through the information. Presentation packages usually have a single price and simply offer different modes for cerotic and playback.
There are other software packages, which can be considered authority systems in the broad sense of the term. Some are intended for creation of hypertext documents, the term coined by Ted Nelson to mean non-sequential writing. These packages have certain features not necessarily found in training or presentation systems. These include the ability to make links from one place in a document to another, such as a reference to textual term that can be activated as a hot button to take the reader to a full explanation of the term. Another feature is the capability to search all of the text in the entire document for all the occurrences of a specific word or phrase, known as indexed search.