One of the challenges text-based publishers face when they decide to take the jump into cross-media publishing, is to make their content appealing to users across channels. One of the ways to do so is offering content in many different packages, i.e.: text, still images, video, audio, screencast and image slideshows. A mixture of all these technologies is what we’ll be talking about in this story.

A real multimedia experience can be created with inexpensive tools and if necessary within very tight deadlines. The example “video” I created consists of still images, a voice-over for the narrative and a quickly assembled title sequence. Granted, this short video doesn’t look polished and can be made much better looking given a couple of extra hours work put into it, but the result does convey the message and is easy to assimilate. 

After having taken the shots one morning with the Sony Alpha 700 and its 16-105 mm lens, it took me one hour playing with Final Cut Pro, struggling with a stubborn analogue microphone, editing in SoundTrack Pro, and “creating” a title in Live Type. I could have spent half a day, and then the results would have been far more appealing, but I lacked the time --perhaps you’ll recognise that phrase-- because I was on deadline. I am not a professional photographer nor am I a professional sound editor or a professional video editor.

It’s amazing then that I still managed to create this sample in so little time and with a result that is not so bad you can’t present it to an audience that is used to seeing rough-around-the-edges YouTube movies shot with a mobile phone and in the spur of the moment. 

Easy as Publishing

Now, with a budget a bit more comfortable than my own, I could hire someone who is used to dealing with video and post-production, and given the same time to create and the same tools to work with, he or she could make a polished result that would easily compare to the sort of online material the BBC puts up onto its site.

In essence, with the narrative multimedia sample I created, I showed how easy cross-media publishing can be. The difficulty is not in the creation --unless you absolutely can’t take a properly exposed picture or drag pictures into a window-- not even in the tools you use to create the material with, but in the management of the sources and the results. Unless you have an integrated system that can manage the digital assets you’re using as a source and which handles the workflow from start to end, multimedia projects can become quite messy.

That’s why I for one, and with me a lot of creative people, are awaiting GridIron’s Flow eagerly. GridIron’s Flow is not a workflow application, nor will it make workflow automation a thing of the past. Certainly in environments where multiple people are working in simultaneous publishing streams, an automation tool is an absolute necessity. Flow, however, will show individual users --and small workgroups-- how digital assets are interconnected throughout the many interactions you have with them.

I won’t go into Flow deeper now; it’s still in beta and will be released later this year, but from what I’ve seen it will be a true killer app like we have rarely seen in the last couple of years.

Managing content and components is hard

No, the challenge in cross-media publishing is not so much how to create the appealing content, but how to manage the content and its components. That’s one of the reasons why Digital Asset Management like Elvis exists at all, and why Apple has released --rather late if you consider Avid’s offerings in the area-- Final Cut Server. Apple claims Final Cut Server is aimed to small workgroups and will scale to very large environments. A tool that is aimed at TV studios usually has larger workgroups in the back of its head, so Apple really is targeting the cross-media publisher as well.

While we will review Final Cut Server as soon as we get the opportunity, I can safely say digital asset management in all its forms will be a growing market in the near future. Unless Web 2.0 proves to be another bubble that is set to burst, we have only started to see the top of the iceberg when it comes to managing content and content components. The creation tools are already there.