Dedicated Authoring Systems

Dedicated Authoring Systems are designed for a single use and generally for single streams. Designing this type of authoring system is simple, but if it should be capable of combining even two object streams, it becomes complex. The authoring is performed on objects captured by the local video camera and image scanner or an objects stored in some form of multimedia object library. in the case of dedicated authoring systems, users need not to be experts in multimedia or a professional artist. But the dedicated systems should be designed in such a way that it has to provide user interfaces that are extremely intuitive and follow real-wold metaphors. A structured design approach will be useful in isolating the visual and procedural design components.

Timeline Based Authoring

In a Timeline Based Authoring system, objects are placed along a timeline. The timeline can be drawn on the screen in a window in a graphic manner, or it is created using a script in a manner similar to a project plan. But the user must specify resource object and position it in the timeline. On playback the object starts playing at that point in the time scale. In most timeline based approaches, once the multimedia object has been captured in a timeline, it is fixed in location and cannot be manipulated easily. So, a single timeline causes loss of information about the relative time lines for each individual object. Editing a component causes all objects in the time line to be reassigned because the positions of objects are fixed in time, only in sequence. Copying portions of timeline becomes difficult because it is difficult to predict the start of new section. This limitation of using timeline approach can be overcome by defining time relations directly between objects.

Structued Multimedia Authoring

A Structured Multimedia Authoring system consists of two stages:

1. The Construction of the structure of presentation.
   
2. Assignment of detailed timing constraints
   

A successful structured authoring system must provide the following capabilities for navigation though the structure of the presentation.

1. Ability to view the complete structure.
   
2. Maintain a hierarchy of objects.
   
3. Capability to zoom down to any specified component.
   
4. View specific components in part or from start to finish.
   
5. Provide a running status of percentage full of the designated length of the presentation.
   
6. Clearly show the timing relations between the various components.
7. Ability to address all multimedia types, including text, image, audio, video and frame based digital images.

The author must ensure that there is a good fit within each object hierarchy level. The navigation design of authoring system should allow the author to view the overall structure while examining a specific object segment more closely. The design of the views must show relevant information for a specific view.

Programmable Authoring systems

Early structured authoring tools were not able to allow the authors to express automatic function for handling certain routine tasks. But programmable authoring system has improved in providing powerful functions based on image processing and analysis and embedding program interpreters to use image-processing functions. The capability of this authoring system is enhanced by building user programmability in the authoring tool to perform the analysis and to manipulate the stream based on the analysis results and also manipulate the stream based on the analysis results. The programmability allows the following tasks through the program interpreter rather than manually.

• Return the time stamp of the next frame.
  
• Delete a specified movie segment.
  
• Copy or cut a specified movie segment to the clip board.
  
• Replace the current segment with clip board contents.
  

Multisource Multi user Authoring System

We can have an object hierarchy in a geographic plane; that is some objects may be linked to other objects by position, while others may be independent and fixed in position. We need object data, and information on composing it. Composing means locating it in reference to other objects in time as well as space. Once the object is rendered (rendering here means display of multimedia object on screen) the author can manipulate it and change it's rendering information must be available at the same time for display.

If there are no limits on network bandwidth and server performance, it would be possible to assemble all required components on queue at the right time to be rendered. In Addition to the multi-user composing function, a multi user authoring system must provide resource allocation and scheduling of multimedia objects. This gives raise to a number of synchronization issues.

Synchronization Issues

As multiple servers start writing out the objects to the user workstation, the input must be managed in a temporally intelligent manner and coordinated so that buffers of appropriate streams are managed separately and synchronized for rendering. A composition process manager is essential for this purpose. This problem becomes more complex if some objects must overlap other objects and remain visible. The sequence in which these objects are received and buffered becomes crucial for correct operation.

Another synchronization issue occurs when multiple authors must edit a set of objects sharing common areas on a timeline in a predefined sequence in real time. The objects must be played out to the different users in the proper order. Editing these objects can result in timeline shifts that must be adjusted dynamically.

Finally in a complex composition system, the user may need some specialized capabilities for customizing their environment. A programmable system is highly desirable for such system authoring requirements. 

Telephone Authoring Systems

There is an application where the phone is linking into multimedia electronic mail application.

• The phone can be used as a reading device by providing full text-to-speech synthesis capability so that a user on the road can have electronic mail messages read out on the telephone.

• The phone can be used for voice command input for setting up and managing voice mail messages. Digitalized voice clips are captured via the phone and embedded in electronic mail messages.

• As the capability to recognize continuous speech is deployed, phones can be used to create electronic mail messages where the voice is converted to ASCII text on the fly by high-performance voice recognition engines.
  

Applications of Telephone authoring Systems

The Telephone authoring Systems supports different types of applications. Some of them are:

• Workstation control for Phone mail
  
• Voice Commands controls for phone mail.
  
• Embedding of phone mail in electric mail.
• Voice synthesis in integrated voice mail and electronic mail
• Local/Remote continuous speech recognition

Hypermedia Application Design Consideration

The user interface must be highly intuitive to allow the user to learn the tool quickly and be able to use them effectively. In addition, the user interface should be designed to cater to the needs of both experienced and inexperienced user.

In addition to control of their desktop environments, users also need control of their System environment. 

This control should include some of the following:

* The ability to specify a primary server for each object class within a domain specified by the system administrative. A domain can be viewed as a list of servers to which they have unrestricted access.

* The ability to specify whether all multimedia objects or only references should be replicated

* The ability to specify that the multimedia object should be retrieved immediately for display versus waiting for a signal to "play" the object. This is more significant if the object must be retrieved from a remote server.

* Display resolution defaults for each type of graphics or video object

* Decompression should be performed at another network server or locally. 

Essential For good Hypermedia Design

1. Determining the type of hypermedia applications
   
2. Structuring the information
   
3. Determining the Navigation Throughout the application
   
4. Methodologies for accessing the information
   
5. Designing the user interface
   

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Integration of Applications

The computer may be called upon to run a diverse set of applications, including some combination of the following:

=> Electronic Mail

=> Word processing or technical publishing 

=> Graphics and formal presentation preparation software 

=> Spreadsheet or some other decision support software

=> Access to a relation on Object-oriented database.

 Customized applications directly related to job function:

 *Billing

  *portfolio Management

 *Others

Integration of these applications consists of two major themes:

The appearance of the applications & The ability of the applications to exchange of data.

Common UI and Application Integration

Microsoft windows have standardized the user interface for a large number of applications by providing standardization at the following levels:

=> Overall visual look and feel of the application windows

=> Menus

=> Dialog Boxes

=> Buttons

=> Help Features

=> Scroll Bars

=> Tool Bars

=> File open and save

This standardization level makes it easier for the user to interact with applications designed for the Microsoft windows operational environment. Standardization is being provided for object linking and embedding (OLE), Dynamic data exchange (DDE), and the remote Procedure calls (RPC). A compound document may consist of a number of different object types such as text, image, spread sheet data, and video. All applications required to operate on various sub-objects of a compound document cooperate in an integrated manner.

Data Exchange

The Microsoft windows clipboard allows exchanging data in any format. It can be used to exchange multimedia objects also. We can cut, and copy a multimedia object in one document and pasting it in another. These documents can be opened under different applications.

The windows clipboard allows the following formats to be stored:

->Text

->Bitmap

->Image

->Sound

->Video (AVI Format)

The data exchange capabilities can be enhanced to make applications more object-oriented, whereby complex objects may be copied to clipboard. 

The receiving applications can specify sub objects it needs from the group stored on the clipboard. The OLE model for application data interchange is being extended to other platforms like Windows NT and UNIX.