Special report: Multipurposing
Finding a purpose
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Content creators use assorted tools and workflows to publish across multiple forms of media
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By Eric A. Taub
You've just created a killer four-color brochure and you can't wait to put it up on your company's Web site. Your project that's now on CD-ROM could sell more copies if you bundled it with a free print version. A DVD rendering of your industrial film would be the ideal medium on which to offer additional footage and text.
Sounds like you're ready to multipurpose your content.
Today, unfortunately, it's often repurposing rather than multipurposing that's the rule, with plug-ins and standalone software being used to produce projects serially, rather than in tandem, for print, disc and the Web.
"Repurposing is an early, chaotic stage of data management that has preceded the development of good publishing systems," said Gary Cosimini, business development manager at Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif.
For publishers to truly multipurpose content, Cosimini said, data format and structure need to be separated. The elements of a document -- be they text, graphics or multimedia -- need to be treated as separate components that can be stored, classified and retrieved at will, depending on their ultimate use.
"What people need are very powerful desktop systems using ordinary databases that will allow people across the Internet to collaborate on the creation of a document," Cosimini said.
Several factors are driving the need for multipurposing, not the least of which is economics.
"The cost of creating a discrete workflow for each medium has now outpaced the value of each," said Glen Turpin, a product manager at Denver-based Quark Inc. "You need to be able to start and finish a product destined for multiple media, all in a single environment," he said.
The primary medium creating the need for efficient multipurposing is, of course, the Web.
"It's the Web that's been the driving factor behind multipurposing," said Mike Maziarka, director at the marketing research and consulting firm CAP Ventures Inc. of Norwell, Mass. Next year, the company estimates, expenditures for software tools that manage Web content will increase by 94 percent.
DVD is also poised to have an effect. Although CD-ROMs still outsell DVD, that's expected to reverse in the next three years, according to research company Dataquest. For content creators, DVD offers significantly more storage capacity and the capability to play full-motion, full-screen movies.
But while the industry waits for something that can be classified as "multipurposing software," content creators forge ahead, repurposing documents, film and other projects for new media with a hodgepodge of disparate tools and workflows.
Print to PDF
With print's historical dominance only recently being challenged by other media, many content creators find themselves turning printed documents into CD-ROMs or Web pages. One technology created with the goal of making printed documents viewable fully formatted on-screen is Adobe Acrobat PDF.
Foxglove Communications chose PDF when it had to create a CD-ROM version of a national publisher's medical textbook -- a 1,200-page tome with 600 photographs.
"One big advantage that Acrobat gave us was that it maintained the high quality of the typography," said Carl Schuetz, owner of the Timonium, Md., company.
The book had been designed in QuarkXPress, but it needed a layout more suitable for on-screen viewing. Schuetz converted the text to ASCII and laid it out again in Adobe PageMaker, which generated a table of contents that Acrobat Distiller used to automatically create hyperlinks to the body of the work. This saved Schuetz's team from manually creating thousands of links.
Schuetz opened the book's illustrations -- 300-dpi CMYK files -- in Photoshop and downsampled them to 144-dpi RGB, rather than the standard 72 dpi, for the CD-ROM. This allows viewers to zoom twice as close to the images for more detail before pixelation occurs.
"This made the quality of the photographs superior to the book version, where you see production artifacts if you look too closely at a picture," Schuetz said.
Schuetz's group also uses Macromedia Authorware to repurpose texts for CD-ROM, especially when producing ancillary materials and teacher guidelines for texts.
"Acrobat is strong for its ease-of-use and text-search capabilities," he said, "whereas Authorware lets you make highly interactive titles. We do both."
Print to HTML
For many, however, PDF isn't right for repurposing print documents for online publishing. Just as a stage play needs to be reworked before it can become a televised presentation, so, too, do many printed pages need reformatting to suit the character of a CD-ROM or the Web.
Sandi Daine, owner of Daine Designs, creates Web and CD-ROM versions of textbooks and trade publications.
She receives her original content in QuarkXPress files, which she converts to
HTML using Extensis' BeyondPress XTension and HexMac Software Systems' HexWeb
and Challenger XT.
Because PDF "is pretty much an actual copy of the Quark document," Daine said, "you don't have the opportunity to do as much to it as you can with HTML coding. It limits you."
Still, Daine isn't completely happy with any of the text-conversion tools she uses. "Using HexWeb and Challenger XT," she said, "I get pages that have a lot of extraneous code."
And she's had trouble getting BeyondPress to correctly handle photo credits that are in all capitals or positioned vertically in the printed document.
So Daine uses Bare Bones Software's BBEdit to clean up HTML.
"BBEdit takes care of the bulk of my multipurposing work," she said. "It allows me to strip any extraneous coding easily."
Daine also produces commercial CD-ROMs for one of her textbook-publisher clients. But rather than use a multimedia application such as Macromedia Director, she simply puts the book in HTML format and provides a Web browser on the disc, greatly simplifying her workflow.
"My clients prefers HTML because it's easier to use," she said. The CD-ROM is for college students who may not have computers with high-end software, she said, and "they want to make this available to everyone."
Film to DVD
Sometimes print isn't even part of the picture. Eight years ago, San Francisco-based filmmaker Ken Roth created the documentary "What We Didn't Know," an examination of teen pregnancy. Today, he's shooting a follow-up, but this time his project won't wind up just on videocassette. He's planning DVD and Web versions of the film as well. The former will include additional footage and an interactive game.
Roth, of Spot 52 Productions, chose DVD instead of CD-ROM because, he said: "DVD delivers on the promise of CD. People thought CD would give us interactivity, video and audio. DVD delivers it."
The follow-up to "What We Didn't Know" is being filmed on high-definition digital video so that Roth can create versions for standard video and HDTV. He plans to digitize the footage using the Media 100 digital editing system and encode it using Minerva Systems' Minerva Publisher. To compress the video for easy QuickTime downloading on the Web, he will use a RealNetworks codec.
Never underestimate your assets
Regardless of what forms your content will take upon output, digital asset management facilitates the tasks of repurposing and multipurposing.
"Thirty percent of the time, companies wind up re-creating their artwork because they can't find it," said Sioux Fleming, senior product marketing manager for Portfolio, a client/server asset management package from Portland, Ore.-based Extensis Corp. "While the market for digital asset management software was initially ad agencies and others who have lots of artwork, it's now taking off with regular businesses," she said.
Asset management software offers the capability to sort and retrieve images based on file type, creation or modification date or other criteria. Complex, integrated systems are available at the high end. By the middle of next year, Quark is expected to enter the asset management business with the Quark Digital Media System, an Oracle-based client/server database for text, graphics and multimedia content.
In the world of moving images, products such as Excalibur Technologies' Excalibur Screening Room catalog individual frames. Digitized frames are flagged whenever the pattern recognition software detects a cut, fade, camera shift, dissolve or radical change in composition.
The selection of an asset management system should be made carefully, experts say.
"There are more than 100 asset management systems available that relate loosely to layout and publishing systems," Adobe's Cosimini said, "but the use of them is fraught with peril. Some don't support metadata, while others don't work on all platforms."
Back to the future
While content creators are making do with today's digital tools, and asset databases provide a foundation for multipurposing, a new, integrated approach is needed -- one that doesn't focus on, say, print as the starting point, but rather treats all content as output-agnostic. That's when we may see digitized assets retrieved from a centralized database, manipulated for various forms of output, and then routed across a network for feedback even before the presses -- or cameras -- roll.
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