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Record: 1 The art & science of business multimedia development.

Title: Authors: Hudson, Barry White, Drake Source: CD-ROM Professional; Jul95, Vol. 8 Issue 7, p44, 8p, 8 Color Photographs, 4 Charts Docume Article nt Type: Subject *MULTIMEDIA systems industry Terms: *MANAGEMENT *BUSINESS -- Data processing *CD-ROM industry Abstract Focuses on the need for a union between the technical and artistic aspects of multimedia development with the ascension of multimedia CD-ROM business : applications. Role of multimedia development in business; Building of multimedia development team; Preset principles of the multimedia roadmap. 4212 Full Text Word Count: 10490833 ISSN: Accessio 9507111141 n Number : Persiste http://proxygsunt link ecor.galileo.usg.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db to this =a9h&AN=9507111141&site=ehost-live record (Permali nk): Cut and <a href="http://proxygsuecor.galileo.usg.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db Paste: =a9h&AN=9507111141&site=ehost-live">The art & science of business multimedia development.</a> Databas Academic Search Complete e:

A MATTER OF PRINCIPLES

The ascension of multimedia CD-ROM business applications will require individuals and talents who have never worked together to join forces to confront unknown challenges in an area where expectations may be wildly exaggerated On the desktop machines and networks and training classrooms of large corporations and small businesses alike, it is apparent that the marriage of CD-ROm and multimedia is still in the honeymoon stage. Let's face it, though: like most marriages in their first blush, a lot of silly things go on. In order for CD-ROM to survive the consequences of the "for better or for worse" commitment, however, a union must be forged between the optical publishing industry's still too often divergent families of multimedia development; the technical artistic. The days of industrial-strength, text-only bachelorhood in business-oriented CD-ROM titles are gone. Gone, as well, is the perception that multimedia's mission is merely to entertain. In business today, multimedia has become a new and powerful tool that enhances our ability to communicate and understand. But as the title types blur, so do the duties and expectations of participants in CD-ROM development, particularly within the businesses for whom wellwrought multimedia products--fashioned equally with committed, boardroom backing and careful, drawing-board planning--are becoming essential equipment. In the (not so long) "good old days," a business or professional-oriented CD-ROM title was accepted mainly for its data, not its ease of use. But user expectations for both the technical as well as artistic value of CD-Rom have grown significantly. Discs were once marketed based on descriptions of their content, but today's boxes boast much more extensive declarations, typically library and length assessment of digital video clips. This new attitude towards of evaluating and comparing discs has raised expectations for all commercial publishers, and it also posses a formidable challenge to businesses both using and producing discs in-house. For example, how does a six-person computer-based training group for an airline produce a customer relations CBT module with sufficient appeal, when their in-house customers all own Microsoft Encarta? On the other hand, are businesses under the impression that turning tedious employee orientation videos into multimedia CD-ROM will make the experience any more entertaining? More and more, users or producers of large bodies of data, huge imagebases, or voluminous quantities of text seem inclined to suggest casually that the material be "put on CD," of course, the distinctions between data-driven, text-driven, and visually-driven data point to important considerations for CD-ROM design and multimedia development. Unfortunately, just as in marriage, there is no single, simple, easy solution to every problem. There is, certainly, no one-stop shopping for CD-ROM tools, nor a design paradigm or formula that can sustain universal application. There is hope, however, for identifying business, technical, and design objectives that can be used to set standards and categorize potential CD-ROM efforts in the early stages of development. MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPMENT IN TODAY'S BUSINESS: WHERE DOES IT FIT?

Even today, businesses continue to underestimate the extent to which multimedia CD-ROM production will challenge the ingrained organizational boundaries to which companies so often cling. The ascension of multimedia CD-ROM business applications will require individuals and talents who have never worked together to join forces to confront unknown challenges in an area where expectations may be wildly exaggerated. Multimedia CD-ROM development for business use demands contributions of time and talent from art and illustration departments, video production experts, training program staff, electronic publication people, computer support personnel, and input from end users. Different titles will require different mixes of skills at different stages in each project to achieve effective implementation. The sooner developers identify and form these alliances, the better: if multimedia production responsibilities become the exclusive province of the video group, for instance, resulting discs will likely look like modified videotapes; if the publications group takes the reins, the company may well be deluged with discs full of paper reformatted for screen display. Worse still, if the business's first CD-ROM is produced by the computer group--typically the first department to buy a CD-Recorder--the disc is more likely to be designed around data entry screens than icons. Sophomore-level developers should also resist the "success breeding identical success" syndrome. If the first disc produced is a well-received, text-intensive CBT, many will accept that model as the way all multimedia rifles should look and expect subsequent projects to build upon its preset formula instead of tailoring a new interface and metaphor to the new project's material and end-use. While these scenarios may exaggerate the possible outcomes of such projects, there remains an unmistakable trend to repurpose material and cram it on a disc rather than generating source material specifically for interactive screen access. The trend hearkens back to music LPs in the early 1970s that brandished labels touting them as "Mono: Reprocessed for Stereo," or today's audio CDs of material originally issued on LP, which often bear caveats like "Warning: Recorded on analog equipment, however, the Compact Disc can reveal the limitations of the source tape." A similar disclaimer for CD-ROM might read: "Caution: Material originally captured for use by linear thinkers. Use could be hazardous to your artistic sensitivity." FORGING THE LINKS: BUILDING A MULTIMEDIA TEAM A well-formed multimedia development team hinges on a unique alliance, as it affiliates experts from the technical side of a business with denizens of the artistic side. Those with a technical or computer background envision the artists bogging down the project wasting hours pondering proper color balances, font selections, and artistic design, only to have those items fall upon unappreciative eyes during the presentation. The artists dread what they imagine will be the computer folks' inevitable insistence that the data in itself will be enough to communicate the full power of the knowledge represented by bits. One trap that may prove perilous to both sides is forgetting that the objective of a project is to convey a message, not experiment with whatever new tricks and toys happen to be available. Contributors from the creative side have the most experience as story tellers, but lack sufficient

understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the technology to define the digit-driven environment within which their art can be presented. Still instinctively presentation-conscious, the artists will--at least initially--defer to the technical experts, who are always anxious to try out the latest software or hardware trick they have learned, regardless of how it serves the aesthetic needs of the project at hand. In many business applications, such endeavors have garnered lukewarm responses because the compromises that drag down a title's development process show through the presentation and overshadow the material. Although the creators expect the projects to provide landmark showcases for the talents of the teams and skills of the partnership, the results usually fail to meet the expectations. However, as artists have become more comfortable with both technologists and the technology, they have begun to explore CD-ROM's unique aspects and subsequently to exploit them. This desire to create so-called multimedia work that represents not just an electronic equivalent to the printed version, but rather a whole new concept promises eventually to be an ideal application of artistic talent. Today's artists and technical contributors who are exploring the limits and potential of the medium and its delivery may eventually define a whole new form of expression. The Art Director's New Role Until recently, project directors have struggled to understand the limits of software and delivery platforms and monitor the activities of all team members to stay within the boundaries. With technology and tools rapidly changing and evolving, developers tend to let each new CD-ROM push the envelope by exploiting the latest technological advances. This inclination often proves counter-productive since much time is wasted in rediscovering all the basic production methods for the newly-defined environment, a process not unlike the proverbial "reinventing the wheel." Rather than re-creating the ground rules and assumptions for each new project, an effective team must be given the opportunity to operate against a set of predetermined guidelines, or principles. Most workgroups have working principles, but few take the time to debate them, write them down, and choose to work within the structure they impose. Most groups' principles derive from incremental changes to the way things have always been done, not rules by which a task force might operate if its members had never encountered the technology before. To assist in team building and establishing project management guidelines, the creation of multimedia development principles can prove an invaluable asset. This process typically involves interactive sessions in which all stake-holders voice their perceptions, concerns, and finally their visions of what might be gained through the use of new technology. The best sessions encourage participants to define objectives that will survive changes in technology and provide a trustworthy roadmap through the turmoil of rapidly changing products. Principles are not easy to develop, and those appropriate to one business may not apply to another. They solidify and publicize a business's long-range goals and empower developers and planners to make informed decisions without calling meetings to cultivate consensus each time. THE MULTIMEDIA ROADMAP: PRESET PRINCIPLES

The ideal result of project management planning is to establish a single principle for each situation, which all parties agree to abide by until it is no longer applicable or is changed to meet new challenges or take advantage of new product offerings. Principles--which can be reinforced in a project as simply as choosing to develop exclusively for Windows or Macintosh, or be as technical-design-specific as establishing whether a multimedia title's background music will be applied via MIDI or, say, 22KHz single-channel audio--often help moderate disagreements over changes of direction based on promises of new products or appealing (but unproven) technologies. They allow a workgroup to focus on its goals, and not be distracted by the urge to deploy every new product that comes to market. Design principles allow a group to advance a single vision, though all participants may not understand or be directly affected by all of its guidelines. With its principles established, however, a team is better equipped to act as an optimized system which prepares work in a form easier for the next person to use, not a production line where the work is passed from one member to the next for minor change or addition of a feature. Without preset design principles, multimedia CD-ROMs inevitably suffer from a significantly flawed development process, where extra work will be created as each developmental stage occurs in isolation and fails to account for the consequences of succeeding stages. A typical "flawed" scenario might unravel like this: the text is produced in word processing software, heavily formatted using a number of visually diverse fonts, and typeset and paginated for portrait orientation on standard paper. This content file is passed to an illustrator who reorients the document pages after inclusion of visuals and reduces the font sizes to maintain page number references in the content. The CD-ROM developer now has to undo all layout efforts to reformat the data for effective screen layout and interactive retrieval. Had all the participants understood the final goal, and followed shared principles to achieve it, no work would have been duplicated or wasted. Principles are debatable issues for which a specific direction is chosen and followed. Depending on their scope, a multimedia team developing for inhouse and commercial business use might establish between 10 and 15 principles. Depending on a business' particular needs, a set of principles for each area will be selected and followed consistently. Ideally, the principles direct decisions for all projects, but in a diversified environment, different suites of principles could be applied to different projects. Most importantly, all participants must understand the ground rules before the project begins. Business Principles: Rudiments of Direction and Design Business principles define the scope and variety of the products and services of a multimedia group as well as stating the business philosophy. Unless a project is endowed with unlimited resources and extraordinary people, there will be limits to the type and amount of work that it can accomplish. With respect to authoring tools, for example, some companies choose MacroMedia Director as their sole development environment due to its cross-platform capabilities and low-cost runtime distribution. Not all projects fit well into the Director design metaphor, however, and that is

precisely why businesses should have specific principles established to test against the particular features of given design environments. A business that is ill-matched with the Director metaphor might choose to turn work away, or (even worse) force a title, such as a text-intensive publication, into a tool that may not be best suited for it. Another company might choose to be generalist, and learn the fundamental capabilities of a number of packages, and be able to choose the best tool for the situation, be it driven by development cost constraints, platform issues, or datatypes. The end product might not pack so much punch or command a premium price, but the title's producer will be able to satisfy a broader customer base than the Director specialists. Principles of Content Management: Data Storage Set-up Standards Content management principles define the underlying technology standards regarding file formats, supported datatypes, and mechanisms for exploiting interchange and reuse of data during development. Creating multimedia assets such as photographs and movies is timeconsuming work and requires studied forethought for details like choosing uniform or adaptive palette structures for stored images. Proper planning and management will provide a simpler, more predictable environment for updating earlier titles and creating new ones. One instance in which content management would be important is a business-based training application for employee orientation. The developers might choose to embed all video dips and photographic images into the runtime executable file so that users could not copy a file or use it out of context. A week before the title is pressed, let's say, the CEO of the company resigns, rendering useless his photo, all seven videoclips of his remarks, and their twenty-three hyperlinks. In addition to capturing new footage of the acting CEO to replace the originals, the developers have to find and correct every reference point to the assets, and face the prospect of redoing the work yet again--presuming a reasonable life expectancy for the training application when a permanent CEO is appointed. Had the design been fashioned on modular principles, there would have been seven files (CEO1.MOV, CEO2.MOV, etc.), that could have been replaced with the new fines featuring whoever is the succeeding CEO, in a matter of minutes. Tenets of Technical Design: Gauging End-user Hardware Capacity The principles surrounding technical design confront developers with the greatest challenges regarding compromise. While developers typically use fast computers with lots of disk' space and large monitors, they ill serve their title's audience if they forget who the audience is and how to design with a typical user's hardware limitations--presuming MPC or MPC-2 configurations-in mind. This area in particular compels artists both to accept and learn to use the technology. Recent computer-based advertising such as Magellan Systems' Merchant Catalog Shopping CDROM and the Shamrock Communications' LucasArt Entertainment/Chrysler demo, serve as excellent examples of instances in which the designers recognized the limitations confronted

when producing a disc for mass distribution. Both discs are playable on Macintosh and Windows platforms and were designed for lower-end capacity computers. The Chrysler disc, in particular, demonstrates a number of design concessions such as exchanging small-frame movies for reasonable smoothness of motion, and illustration-like photographs of automobile interiors that make the most of an often-limiting 256-color palette to provide a nonetheless pleasing surrealistic presentation. Had the discs been made specifically for an audience armed with Pentium computers and quad speed drives, the movies could have been larger and the photographs more life-like, but then the developers would have been confronted with filling space on a 660MB CD-ROM. For every obstacle they overcome, another confronts multimedia technical designers. Interface Design Integration: Molding Interface Enhancements to Established Project Goals Principles of interface design help programmers and artists identify the necessary components of user interface--like custom navigational icons built for the title, or using Adobe Acrobat-type default buttons--and weigh them against the desired components and the impact they have on other sets of principles. Innovative game designers have challenged developers in other arenas by demonstrating how all items on all screens can be considered potential hot-buttons to be explored. In a business communications setting, which demands more direct and predictable access, buttons and their uses need to be more obvious; but they don't have to be boring, or even rectangular, for that matter. The Nutra Facts menu, for instance, has hidden buttons in the food items displayed on the screen, and perhaps even undiscovered "bonus buttons" -in other words, visually highlighted clickable items that are obvious, but still visually appealing. Some interface design principles are a matter of taste, but most often they are moderated by requirements for ease of use or consistency. Increasingly, many businesses view multimedia as an extension of video, print, or computer technologies. Many proponents of business process redesign recommend that participants in an industry like multimedia, with its rapidly changing rules, view the emergence of new technologies in a virgin context, not as an extension of the existing circumstances. Consequently, they should aspire to develop titles within a definitive structure that a custom-designed set of workable principles alone can provide. MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPMENT: ART, SCIENCE, OR BUSINESS? Building multimedia-making teams of artists and scientists through the use of principles development will satisfy the concerns of both the technical experts and artists, while providing a foundation of design guidelines that will enable business-oriented multimedia developers to make consistent decisions regarding the technical aspects of projects. Modern communications tools require a basic understanding of fundamental visual/language skills coupled with a solid grounding in technology. To excel, these modern-day raconteurs need to push these basics and develop a new language. The potential exists for satisfying both needs,

but not without a commitment and a shared desire of developers from different fields to learn from each other. Design is a foreign word to many computer developers. In some cases, developers are satisfied when a title works at all and consider art and design an obstacle or an afterthought. Some developers' artistic achievements are falsely reinforced if a title also happens by sheer coincidence to look good. Designers and developers must complement each other and work as a team. CD-ROM today, whether in business or for commercial sale, must be designed to work, and look good by design. BUSINESS PRINCIPLES
Alternative Principle A Our business will undertake a wide variety of CD-ROM development, including scientific databases, entertainment discs, and online reference materials. Alternative Principle B Our businesses will specialize in a limited number of activities such as multimedia marketing, corporate public relations, and new product introductions. Each project will be assessed to determine if it is data-, content-, or visually-driven, and the appropriate tool from a standard suite of tools will be selected as the authoring and delivery mechanism based on the primary datatype.

A single development tool will be selected for use in all projects so that it can be mastered for broad applicability.

Determining the scope of a business' multimedia development program in its earliest stages is crucial because it involves making choices in critical subject areas, from alternatives like those suggested above. CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Alternative Principle A A library of 640 x 480 color images will be managed in TIFF 24-bit color for scaling and conversion into specific formats depending on final use. QuickTime will be the single movie format, regardless of delivery platform. Alternative Principle B To avoid palette clash, all images will be balanced against a uniform 256-color palette and and stored and deployed in 8-bit TIF format.

Windows applications will use AVI movie format and Macintosh will use QuickTime.

Frame rate will take precedence over frame size in the compression of movies. Linked external data files will be cryptically named or hidden from the CD-ROM directory to discourage copying and protect intellectual property rights.

All movies will be delivered in no smaller than 180x240 at not less than 15 frames per second. Linked external data files will have useful mnemonics to encourage copying and re-use by users in further dissemination or re-use of data in internal databases online references.

Establishing content management principles at the outset of multimedia development can prevent an enormous amount of potential backpedaling later on, by structuring the physical environment of file formats and retrieval mechanisms in which data will be manipulated during a title's use. TECHNICAL DESIGN
Alternative Principle A All single and crossplatform development will be done on Macintosh. Alternative Principle B All applications will be developed for deployment on both Macintosh and Windows, even if only one platform is originally specified. All titles will require a minimum MPC-2 (486, double speed CD-ROM, 256 colors) configuration. Movie palettes will contain thousands of colors, and platforms with 256 colors will use the existing dithering capabilities of the movie player software. The CD-ROM may use up to 3MB of the user hard disk, and modify system startup and Windows configuration files.

All titles will require a minimum MPC (386, single speed CD-ROM) configuration. Movie palettes will be limited to 256 colors for predictable playback quality on all systems with 256 colors or more. The CD-ROM will be fully self-contained and require no modifications to the system startup files or use of permanent storage on the user hard disk. Cross-platform CD-ROMs will utilize and share data wherever possible.

Cross-platform CD-ROMs will contain two separate partitions and adaptations of the data, each optimized for the specific platform. A variety of fonts will be used and licensed and distributed on

Font selection will be limited to the 35

typefaces available in Adobe Type Manager's base-35 Postscript.

the CD-ROM, if necessary.

One advantage of pinning down technical design principles early on is that it determines the presumed system capabilities for which the multimedia title will be designed, which in turn predicates a range of decisions about what technology the title will use. INTERFACE DESIGN
Alternative Principle A Buttons will look like buttons and will be labeled with text or a standard icon. Navigational icons, such as zoom and next and previous page, will be created to customize each title developed. Documents paper and identical layout on produced on both CD-ROM will have pagination and both media. Alternative Principle B Interfaces will be visual and users will be encouraged to explore the screens to find hidden buttons and hot-spots. The default navigational features provided by the authoring tool will be used in the delivered product. Documents produced on both paper and CD-ROM will be reformatted for interactive screen retrieval. It is permissible to convey essential information in an audio-only format.

Spoken text and instructions will be accompanied by printed display of the same information. The data format behind each hot-button will be evident from the button itself so users can choose to view based on knowledge of the datatype.

Buttons will briefly describe the subject matter behind them and utilize the appropriate datatype (text, sound, visual, or movie) which best communicates the information.

When issues of interface design are settled early in the development process, and customized for the project at hand, other aspects of a title are much more easily adapted to a chosen interface's strengths and weaknesses. PHOTO (COLOR): Another, more artistically and innovatively expressive approach to linking users to the same "Nutra Facts" menu paths supplies a visual interface that more closely resembles a puzzle-solving or maze-navigating experience by encouraging users to explore the screens to find hidden buttons and hot-spots. PHOTO (COLOR): In addition to enabling the convergence of different physical media, multimedia technology has also brought business and entertainment-oriented developers onto

some common ground. One example of a nutrition guide interface illustrates both a linear, explicitly categorical, standard, icon- or text. based approach to arranging the buttons that connect the user to the guide's menu paths. PHOTO (COLOR): Two presentation styles for a multimedia title exploring the "War Between the States" highlight two distinct modes of categorizing material that illustrate the marriage of artistic and technical perspectives as they are incrementally divorced viewing all content as pure binary code. The first set of menu options serves a multimedia title that breaks down by distinct media or data structures, photographs, line drawings, etc. PHOTO (COLOR): The second approach breaks the title down purely by content, combining photo, graphic, and text documents within subject areas organized with the content's thematic concerns primarily in mind. The different approaches to blending media in presenting the same project in these menu formats exemplify the need to establish overarching data structures early in a multimedia title's development. PHOTO (COLOR): One approach to multimedia development for business is to incorporate images and sound for heightened aesthetics while straying as little as possible from standard data delivery and interlace structure by using the default navigational features provided by the authoring tool in the delivered product. PHOTO (COLOR): Titles pushing one step beyond into multimedia enhancements and away from standard delivery incorporate navigational icons such as zoom, next and previous page to add uniqueness to each title developed. ILLUSTRATION: Two directory screens illustrate opposite content management principles used to divergent purposes. Above, linked external datafiles are cryptically named or hidden in a multimedia CD-ROM directory to discourage copying and protect intellectual property rights. ILLUSTRATION: Here, linked external datafiles are described with useful mnemonics to encourage copying and re-use of data for further dissemination in internal databases and online references. ~~~~~~~~ By Barry Hudson and Drake White Barry J. Hudson (scientist) and Drake White (artist) are currently discovering the limits and potential of CD-ROM production while working at Phorum. All correspondence can be addressed to Phorum, 802 Ellis Street, Augusta, GA 30901; 706/722-2263; CIS--73323,277.

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