1. Multimedia Software Tools

2. 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.

3. Elemental Tools Painting And Drawing Tools Cad And 3-D Drawing 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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, Sound Forge

9. 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
Flash example:

10. 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.
Ex: SnagIt, Camtasia Studio

11. 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 (e.g. Powerpoint) 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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

19. 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: Authorware Professional

20. Authorware Icons Display Interaction Motion Calculation Erase Map Wait
Digital Movie
Navigate
Sound
Framework
DVD
Decision
Knowledge Object

22. 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

23. Group discussion
Discuss the typical application areas for card based, icon based and time based authoring systems.

24. 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.

25. 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, Java, C#, Python
Document development tools

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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.

31. Graphical structure editor
The Authoring Tree
Graphical structure editor
Scripting language
Extensions in C
Machine code
Ease of
use
Flexibility
and
speed

32. 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.)
Why not followed? Because only few people within mm productions have knowledge of software developments. Hence there are also language problems.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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.”
Admiral Grace Hopper found a bug (insect) in an early mainframe back in 9th September 1947.

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.