Multimedia Authoring System

Multimedia Authoring Systems are designed with two primary target users: They are

• Professionals who prepare documents, audio or sound tracks, and full motion video clips for wide distribution.
  
• Average business users preparing documents, audio recordings, or full motion video clips for stored messages or presentations.
  

The authoring system covers user interface. The authoring system spans issues such as data access, storage structures for individual components embedded in a document, the user's ability to browse through stored objects, and so on. Most authoring systems are managed by a control application. The authoring system is called in when a user selects an EDIT function in the control application menu.

The control application managing the authoring system must determine storage location and compression format according to the type of multimedia object, the capturing equipment in use, and the software drives and compression standards supported by the authoring system. The control application must also be designed to handle sufficient cache storage to manage compressed as well as decompressed objects before they are dispatched to other multimedia server objects.