media applications

The imposing heterogeneity of media applications

This blog is dedicated to the discussion of emerging web technologies. Today, we look at a the rapidly growing world of media applications, and their impact on the Semantic Web.

The problem of searching for media assets.

We’ve already looked at advanced media, in particular video, audio, and animation data, in previous blog postings. In particular, we’ve looked at the subtle and complex nature of media asset semantics. We’ve seen that interpreting a piece of video, for example, is far, far more difficult than interpreting an integer or character field. Since the goal of the Semantic Web effort is to make the searching of the web highly automated, advanced media is becoming a huge and critical research and development focus for the builders of next-generation web development applications.

Just how do we provide an environment where media assets can be searched in a mostly automatic fashion, so that a human does not have to painfully paw through hundreds or thousands (or millions) of video chunks to find the right one? We’ve looked at emerging technologies for marking up advanced media information, and for making it usable in a variety of web applications. We’ve also looked at the dramatic challenge presented by mega apps to would-be users; the interfaces to these applications are truly massive and cannot present to the user the way in which they are meant to be used.

The problem of proprietary formats.

One specific, and very difficult problem, is the massive heterogeneity, not just of media formats, compression technologies, and container technologies, but of the applications themselves. If we are going to automate the searching of complex modeling, video, audio, and other media assets, we’re going to have to address a key question: since many media apps make use of their own proprietary data formats, how are we going to provide automated ways of searching media assets that are stored in these formats?

The problem of highly imperfect generic formats.

There are indeed many existing, as well as soon-to-emerge, standards for importing and exporting data between powerful media applications, but transformations in and out of these formats are often “lossy”, in that information is lost or changed. In fact, locating and downloading assets that are in supposedly-generic form is often very frustrating, because these assets end up not performing well. They can be difficult to edit and reuse. 3D animation models regularly blow up when animators try to import them into animation applications and the manipulate them. A hawk may look like a hawk until you try to render it with its wings flapping, and suddenly it’s a blob of geometric garbage.

One possible direction.

So, what do we do about the fact that many media assets must be manipulated by the original applications that created them? How can we facilitate reuse? It’s extremely unrealistic to expect users to master perhaps dozens of video or audio or animation applications. Filtering assets according to their file extensions is a good idea, and it is a well established practice.

But what we really need is a globally-known site that either literally or conceptually centralizes the massive network of import/export relationships, along with information about the relative success of these mappings. Are they ever lossy? If so, can they be fixed? What series of applications might we want an asset to be imported/exported through so that in the end it is in a usable format, given the applications that the user owns and has mastered?

There is much to be done. Right now, searching for and reusing media assets is a painstaking, trial-and-error-prone process.

Personal Information Management Applications and Web 3.0

This blog is devoted to the discussion of Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0 technology.

Managing personal and small group information.

When it comes to so-called Web 2.0 and 3.0 technology, one of the most proliferate marketplaces involves the explosion of applications for managing information for individuals and small groups. Looking only at applications developed for Macs, we see an array of information management technologies.

Notebooks.

One of the most popular formats for managing information uses the paradigm of a notebook. The user can create a notebook, often selecting from multiple canned formats, such as a diary, class notes, or a novel, complete perhaps with a notebook cover and a spiral wire down the left side. The application creates a table of contents, and users can create sections and pages - and stuff virtually any kind of information on each page. Two very good examples of this approach are NoteShare and Notebook.

Interestingly, and perhaps because many of the applications in this category have been around for a number of years, these tend to not be true web applications. Often you can share notebooks, including full read/write access, via a URL and a simple browser interface, and you can publish a notebook at a URL. But the products are primarily for single-user, desktop use.

A good example of a notebook application that is a true web application is Zoho Notebook. (Zoho actually provides a large set of web based applications, of which the note program is just one.)

Buckets.

The other very popular note format uses the bucket or folder approach. The application may or may not support the nesting of these buckets and/or the creation of conceptual buckets, so that a given note can exist in more than one bucket. Two very good applications that use this approach are SOHO Notes and Yojimbo. These two applications are desktop-based, although most applications in this category support the synching of notes over multiple machines, using the Apple web-synching technology.

A hybrid desktop/web application is Evernote, which has elegant desktop applications for Windows machines, Macs, and a variety of handhelds and cell phones. It also has a very effective web interface. The user can sync multiple Evernote desktop instances via Evernote’s web server. Users can thus avoid ever using the web interface.

Outlines.

One specialized sort of information management application involves the creation of embedded outlines and bulleted lists. These applications, such as OmniOutliner, actually provide a full notebook functionality as well. OmniOutliner notebooks can be published on the web, but it is very definitely a desktop application.

Task lists.

An even more specialized class of information management applications support To-Do lists. Great examples are Zenbe Lists (they also provide integrated email and collaborative software) and rememberthemilk.com. These are web applications.

Photos and video.

There are a rapidly growing number of applications that allow users to collect, sort, tag, edit, and share photographs and video. Apple’s iPhoto is a great example. It is very much a desktop app, although applications in this class typically support the publication of images and video on the web, and sometimes, even read/write access via the web.

Stories, scripts, novels, and storyboards.

There are a number of highly specialized applications that support the development of fiction, including Final Draft and Montage (scripts), Scrivener and StoryMill (fiction prose), and Toon Boom storyboard (which is actually an impressive drawing program). Again, users can often publish to the web. Interestingly, many of these applications can easily be used as full blown, generic note applications, and can manage many forms of media.

Diary Applications.

Perhaps the most popular diary application on Macs is MacJournal (by the Montage and StoryMill folks). An interesting twist is that it is also an excellent blogging program. I use it to write this blog. This is, of course, one of the most widely used vehicles for sharing information on the web, and you can expect other sorts of personal information management systems to have blogging capabilities added to them.

Small, forms-based database management systems.

These applications are desktop apps. Apple’s Bento is a very good example. It actually is a sort of hybrid database/spreadsheet application. The most recent release allows multiple instances of Bento to share databases running on computers on a shared network.

Mind-Mapping.

The “circles and lines” applications have become highly specialized. The most well known one is MindManager, and there are versions for Windows machines and Macs. These are desktop apps. The vender, MindJet, recently introduced both web interfaces for sharing and updating desktop mind maps, as well as a web-based application that has a fresh, smooth interface, and provides team collaboration tools. Many forms of media can be placed in MindManager, including data from a wide variety of relational database management systems.

Screen and audio capture.

There are a number of applications that allow users to capture desktop video, along with audio voice-overs. Camtasia (which has Windows and Mac products) and Screenium are popular products.

These applications are, in a way, successors to slide applications like Microsoft Powerpoint and Apple Keynote. More and more presentations are being engineered with screen capture and audio applications, and these applications often support text and image data, as well as the insertion of video capture of the speaker. Sometimes, Powerpoint slides can be imported.

Conferencing apps.

There are several applications that provide hybrid desktop/browser live communication, including video, sound, and collaborative white-boarding. The best known one is probably Cisco WebEx, which comes in varieties for Macs and Windows machines. Skype supports a similar, limited product - which is free. One of the nice things about these products is that they come with their own voice lines. Other products, like Adobe ConnectNow, require the use of a cell phone to carry voice. With most of these products, a conference can be recorded for later use.

Finally…

Importantly, we note that in this rapidly-exploding marketplace, the borders between these various categories are being broken down, and applications often support a number of these capabilities at once. A good example is Curio, a desktop application that supports notes, lists, video, audio, white-boarding, mind-mapping, and limited web publishing.

Mega Media Apps: A Huge Challenge for Web 3.0

What Are Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 Apps?

In our continuing series on Web 2.0/3.0 and Semantic Web technology, we’ve discussed one particularly impressive Web 2.0 app: Evernote. The challenge is to get the best of both worlds: the interactive performance of a desktop application, and the use-it-from-anywhere convenience of the Web. Many Web applications - such as Evernote - also ensure offline usability by providing both a desktop and webpage interface, and maintaining a local version of the database, which is periodically synched with the web-resident database.

But, as cleverly engineered as it is, and as useful as it is, Evernote is still a very simple application. What about big applications? What challenges face the developers of Web 3.0 applications, ones that will manipulate large databases of continuous data, and extra-large instances of blob data? (Video and sound are continuous; an image is blob data.)

Let’s consider one of the biggest media apps out there: Maya, the high-end 3D application that is widely used to make full length animated movies. (See http://autodesk.com for Maya.)

What’s the big problem? If an application like Maya was reengineered as a Web app along the lines of Evernote, would it be usable? Might it be intractable to be continuously moving complex animation data between the server and your client machine?

3D Geometry: Just How Big Is It?

Well, the problem is not the complex geometric models that an application like Maya must store and manipulate. 3D animation applications like Maya tend to support multiple ways of creating 3D shapes, and they do indeed tend to be very data-intensive. The first image at the bottom of this page shows a Maya screen with two spheres, one built with straight line geometry and one built with curved line geometry.

As it turns out, to make the straight line model smooth, you would need to use many more lines and vertices than I have in the the model in the image. But if you think about it, the straight line model uses the geodesic dome approach; it builds a 3D sphere out of many 2D polygons - which are flat. The more polygons, the smoother the model. In the other model, we use curved lines, and so the model looks much smoother, even with not that much detail. But the mathematics are complex.

You can image that a dense scene, with a very large number of detailed, 3D models of these sorts would contain a lot of data. But no, that’s not the problem. These models can be uploaded and download very quickly. They aren’t as big as you might image - because they are not continuous data. They are blobs, either binary or of code text, and are reasonably manageable.

The Killer Problem: Video.

The problem? It’s what Maya creates at the end of the design process, when Maya renders a scene so we can watch it. It renders video. And video, whether you are looking at video shot with your home camera, or at video rendered by Maya, or video I create when I capture desktop videos on how to use Maya and post it for my animation students, well, it’s big. Really big.

Video is the killer. Video makes a lot of mega apps, and even very simple apps that happen to create video, not scale. We could manage a modest number of modest-sized video segments via a web interface, but not big chunks of video. To make videos even worse, we usually have to add a sound track.

So, the lesson is that many or most applications that create and/or edit video in any form face this challenge.

This is why we use video compression. First, you need a container, which is a way of bundling the huge series of still images that make up the video, with the sound, as so that we can move it around as a single object. (Keep in mind that often consists of at least 25 frames, or still images, per second - and that makes for big pieces of continuous data.) Popular containers for small scale projects (such as animations that will be marketed via CDs) are .mov and .avi. The first is the Apple Quicktime standard, and the second is due to Microsoft.

Once you have a container, you need a codec, which is a way of compressing and decompression video, so that it isn’t so big when you move in over the Internet or store it on a small storage device. Codec actually stands for “code” and “decode”. It cannot be overstated how powerful a codec can be; I routinely turn gigabyte videos submitted by my students into less-than-100 megabyte videos. They can be uploaded to a website and then played, and at least in a small box on a web page, they look great.

But if you want quality, if you don’t want to lose detail, and if in particular, if you are going to display a video on a large display (or at the movie theatre), you often cannot compress it enough.

That’s it. That’s the problem, and it’s one of the biggest challenges facing the makers of Web 3.0 apps, which are supposed to fluidly manipulate video segments.

A Far Bigger, Far More Universal Problem.

But perhaps the old video challenge, the one that is constantly shoved in the face of next-generation web app developers, is a distraction, something that draws us away from the real problem, the one that kills many media apps, even when they are totally desktop-based. What is it? Take a look at the animation designer’s interface to Maya, in the second image at the bottom of this page.

The problem is the size and complexity of these apps. There are made up of multiple complex windows. They have menus, palettes, and lots of little boxes that contain detailed information. Keep in mind that you only see one of the Maya windows in the image below, at the bottom of the page, and it is already too dense for a single screen, even a large one. Looking more closely at the window in this image, note that there are several places on it that contain drop down menus. Many of these menu items lead to other drop down menus. Even the main menu at the top is changed frequently during the process of creating an animation project. The designer’s GUI as a whole changes during the process of using the app.

It is very hard to fathom the incredible complexity of an interface like Maya’s until you use it. Professional video editing applications are typically simpler, but are still very complex, especially if the application supports special effects and the insertion of text. Even applications intended for the average Joe, like Photoshop Elements, are often horrifically complex.

The Bottom Line.

The problem that faces developers of all sorts of next-generation apps that must manipulate animation or sound or video or images, or that format complex documents for publication (like Adobe InDesign), or support the development of complex web pages (like Adobe Dreamweaver), is this: it is near-intractable or perhaps completely impossible to build an interface that explains to the user the process of using the application. Little wizards or chunks of documentation that contain “recipe” steps, don’t come within a thousand light-years of conveying how to use that app as a whole.

That’s it. True Web 3.0 applications would convey not just a vast, deeply embedded toolset, but the way the tools should be used. That’s the big challenge.

By the way, if you want to see a handful of videos made by my introductory animation students, go to my website at http://buzzking.squarespace.com and look at the right column, near the bottom of the page.