Chapter 2: Multimedia Hardware and Softwarepor Zackson Farm
1. Organization It is essential to develop an organized outline detailing the skills, time, budget, tools, and resources needed for the project.
2. Communication Communication among the workgroup and client is essential to the efficient and accurate completion of your project.
3. Main roles in the team: Project Manager Multimedia Designer Interface Designer Writer Audio/Video Specialist Multimedia Programmer
4. Project manager The leader of a project oversee the entire project. Responsible for overall development, implementation of the project and day to day operations. Multimedia Designer Looks at the overall content of a project, creates a structure for the content. Determines the design elements required to support that structure.
5. Interface designer in charge of designing each screen or page interface that lets the user access or modify the content – simplicity Writer Create characters and actors’ narrations. Write text screens to deliver message. Video /Audio Specialist Focus on the audio and video production - shooting, capturing and editing video, digitizing and audio recording.
6. Multimedia Programmers Multimedia programmers integrate all the elements of the project using an authoring system or programming language.
8. Painting and drawing software features include: An intuitive graphical user interface Scalable dimensions Multiple undo capability Scalable text font support Support for third-party special effect plug-ins Layering capability
9. Image editing tools Powerful tools for enhancing retouching, blurring, sharpening, lightening existing bitmapped images. Many painting and drawing programs also serve as image editors. Support third party plug-in.
10. An authoring tool is a software package which allow developers to : Organize and edit the multimedia elements of multimedia project. Design screen layouts(interface) using templates Create interactivity assembling diverse multimedia elements into a single, cohesive product.
11. 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. It is easy to move from page to page because most programs use buttons and hot spots which allow the user to choose their own path. LiveCode is an example of a card-based system.
12. Time-based authoring tools The elements of the program are organized along a time line. Best suited for messages with a beginning and an end. Developer can coordinate the time, speed and display length of each elements. Adobe Flash and Adobe Director are time-based development environments.
13. Choosing an authoring tool Editing and organizing features Programming features Interactivity features Performance tuning and playback features Delivery, cross-platform, and Internet playability features
14. Requirements of for a multimedia project The intangibles Multimedia skills Hardware Software Authoring systems
15. four basic stages in a multimedia project: Planning and costing Designing and Producing Testing Delivering
16. Set the contents Content or information will determine the size of the project. Consideration before determining the content are: Obtaining rights to use exiting resources. Digitizing pictures, audio, and video.
17. Alpha Testing Often performed only by users within the organization developing the software as a form of internal acceptance testing. The application may be missing part of the content or functionality. The main interest is to review the concept, format, user interface and the layout.
18. Beta Testing The product is evaluated just before the final release. It is a fully functioning product and should be relative bug free. Main interest is to find bugs or content errors. The testing group should be represented by the real users and should not include the people who have been involved in the project.
19. Windows vs. Macintosh The Microsoft Windows operating system can run on assemblages of hardware from countless manufacturers. Unlike Microsoft, primarily a software company, Apple is a hardware manufacturing company that developed its own proprietary software to run the hardware. Apple Computer produces both the computer and the operating system. Many developers believe that multimedia project development is smoother and easier on the Macintosh than in Windows
20. Connections Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) Universal Serial Bus (USB) FireWire (IEEE 1394)
21. RAM Volatile storage enables the simultaneous running of many applications. Storage that allows to read and write data as many time as needed ROM is nonvolatile storage. The BIOS program that boots up the computer resides in the ROM
22. Input devices An optical character recognition (OCR) device is used to convert printed matter into ASCII text files. Barcode reader recognize the numeric characters of the Universal Product Code (UPC) Voice recognition systems recognize spoken words and commands. Microphones Digital cameras
23. OCR software Makes use of probability and expert system algorithms Converts bitmapped characters into electronically recognizable text Is very accurate and saves time and effort
24. Icon- and object-based authoring tools Icon-based and object-based tools provide a visual programming approach to organizing and presenting multimedia application. Multimedia elements and interaction cues are organized as objects in a flow chart. Flow charts can be built by dragging appropriate icons from a library and then adding the content.
