Multimedia from Your Desktop

It's like 1985 deja vu, when desktop publishing was the new buzzword. Ten years later, multimedia is the talk of the town, and as in 1985, experts and end-users alike are scrambling to determine what exactly this new technology is, and whether they should jump in and put it to use.

There is already a plethora of so-called multimedia applications, including computer-aided instruction (CAI), hypermedia, computer-driven presentations, computer-based training (CBT), videoconferencing, distance learning, networked video servers or "video on demand," collaborative (whiteboard) authoring, multimedia encyclopedias, educational software, games, and so on. This article concentrates on CAI, hypermedia, and, in particular, on the use of computer-based multimedia for instruction. I hope it will give you a good idea of where multimedia is today and what you might be able to do with it.

Ask five people what multimedia is, and you will probably get five different answers. Some will tell you how easy it is to use, how quickly and effortlessly you can create multimedia; others will tell you how difficult and expensive it is. Here is my definition: It is the convergence of text, graphics, photography, animation, sound, music, and video into a meaningful production that communicates well. Digital multimedia can (should) be interactive and user-adaptive. It can offer effective navigation controls. And it can empower information providers.

Are you ready? Take a look at what others have done. Surf the Web and check out the growing number of home pages and Web publications from UIC departments, faculty and students, and from thousands of information providers around the word. Check out commercial CD-ROM multimedia titles, like A.D.A.M. (medical illustration educational software) or Leonardo The Inventor. Take a look at the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia, Who Built America, or the very popular Myst or 7th Guest games. Better yet, stop by the InfoTech Arcade and we will give you a tour. You'll be surprised by the number of multimedia titles already available; maybe you'll find one that is just right for you.

Start by publishing on the World Wide Web... Put a class syllabus or a week or two of class notes on the Web. You'll need to learn HTML -- a small tag-set markup language used to lay out multimedia elements (text, graphics, etc.) with hypertext pointers. You still have to plan your hypermedia document and obtain the content, but integration is inherently simpler than with very powerful GUI authoring packages geared toward more complex multimedia applications.

Or for a small initial project... Use your favorite wordprocessor for text, Photoshop or PhotoFinish for graphics, Premiere for video, and stick in a sound as well. You might be able to do all the editing using the built-in text, graphics, paint and video tools found in many authoring software like Macromedia Director.

Author a small presentation, a block of lecture materials, perhaps, as a first project for presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint It could be mostly text, with a graphic or photograph or two, and a brief sound click between each slide or "electronic foil." It's easy!

Macromedia Authorware Academic is a small version of the highly awarded Authorware Professional program. Based on a flowchart metaphor, you drop icons representing multimedia elements, actions, and interactions on a flowline. You can "run" the project at any time to see how things are progressing. It comes with 24 instructional design models, created by professionals, for use in education. Just pick a model, load it into an Authorware project file, and fill-in-the-blanks with the multimedia elements you're using.

Multimedia Design mPower takes a rather different approach to creating multimedia presentations. You use a button interface to build "screens." Click a button to place text. Click to bring in a QuickTime movie or a PICT graphics file, select screen transitions, control animation objects, and so on. You'll see results very quickly, particularly if you use its built-in templates.

To illustrate how demanding multimedia development can get, let's consider working with video. Suppose you have an hour of analog video in a VHS tape, and that you want to digitize two minutes worth of video highlights for your multimedia presentation. You have a high-end machine with the latest and greatest software, and a video digitizing board to which you can plug in a VCR and run your tape to capture the video clips. All you want is two minutes of full-screen high-quality color digitized video. You've got time and you are a power user -- what could prevent you from achieving this relatively simple task?

Well, let's see... A full (VGA) screen is 640 by 480 pixels in size. You want good color; "true color" 24-bit color images take three bytes per pixel. TV NTSC-quality video requires 30 frames per second. So, two minutes of digitized video take about 3.3 gigabytes of data (i.e., 640 x 480 pixels x 3 bytes x 30fps x 120 seconds)! Furthermore, note that video editing typically requires having at least three versions of each video clip!

How big did you say your hard disk was? And what kind of super power-ranger-like computer do you have? Did you really think you had enough RAM? If your CPU and bus are fast enough to pump all that data in real time, do you think your disk drive can keep up without dropping video frames? (Unless you have a new AV video disk drive or a high-end RAID storage system, it can't.)

Hope I didn't scare you much. In practice, there are solutions and techniques to deal with the intrinsically high computing demands of working with time-based media like video. For instance, two minutes of video will be more manageable if you use a smaller-size frame (e.g., 1/4 or 1/8 screen), 8-bit color, no more than 15 frames per second, software or hardware-assisted compression and decompression, video-accelerated hardware, or a combination thereof. Time-based media should be used sparingly, and in accordance to the computing resources available to integrate it and to display it.

Do you have a suitable portable computer to carry and display your production via an LCD projection panel? Is storing the multimedia title on a network server to access it from anywhere the way to go? Should you store the multimedia application on a portable SCSI hard drive that you can carry with you? How about writing your final product on a removable disk or to a CD-ROM? How about making copies of the CD-ROM for your students?

We could put your software on a network server and make it instantly available on the 300+ DOS/Windows PCs and Macs in our public labs. We could lend you an LCD projection panel and help you evaluate this exciting technology for portable computer-driven presentations, multimedia, or anything. We might be able to locate a PC laptop or Mac Powerbook to see how that might work for you. There are indeed a lot of alternatives, all doable and all applicable in one case or another. Let us know if we can help you sort them out.

Using multimedia and hypermedia is a cinch, but even so, care must be taken to analyze and put in perspective what these new technologies really bring to the classroom. Developing multimedia programs and hypermedia is a bit more involved. It requires deeper thinking, better understanding, and application of computer technologies instructional and art design, from a responsible, practical, and realistic standpoint.

I'd like to think that multimedia has arrived at UIC, and that it is here to stay. There are several campus-wide initiatives that are helping kick-start interest at UIC in multimedia and the digital world. The university's administration is investing in the development of digital rooms and the required network infrastructure. The Academic Computer Center is committed to helping in this endeavor. We will continue to help faculty, staff and students achieve their goals to create effective multimedia productions.

Comments are appreciated; send them to
Ed Garay, garay@uic.edu