Asymetrix Mediablitz

Wanna delve into multimedia without breaking the bank? Tim Frost assesses this low cost multimedia authoring package for PCs.

Multimedia authoring tools seem to come in two varieties — 'expensive and complex' and 'very expensive and very complex'. If you are serious about creating 'serious' CD‑ROM based projects, then you can spend anything up to £4,000 on authoring software for professional projects. But what has been missing is software at the other end of the market that gets you into multimedia without too many headaches or empty wallets, and still generates a useful end result. On the face of it, multimedia for the musically orientated is not exactly an essential tool; on the other hand, the possibility of adding visual elements — text, still images, animations, and movie clips — to a carefully crafted MIDI track has a certain attraction. And on the commercial side, more and more presentations are moving from the archaic world of overhead projectors into the 20th century of images fed directly from a PC to large‑screen video projectors — an opportunity wide open for adding decent music from MIDI and sampled sound tracks.

Accessing The Media

In its latest release Asymetrix MediaBlitz, a much much smaller brother to the company's £700 professional Toolbook, goes some way to making multimedia accessible to 'normal' users. Assuming you are already working with a PC equipped with a MIDI sound card, preferably a fast 386 with a CD‑ROM drive and plenty of memory and disk space, MediaBlitz makes short work of building a 'presentation' around the music files.

MediaBlitz is not for creating pictures, MIDI or sound tracks. Although it incorporates some basic picture and sound editing facilities, the main creation of each of these elements must be done on your music sequencing, recording or paint software. What MediaBlitz does do is let you hook all the elements together so that your presentation runs as a single entity — sound, pictures, and movies running as a complete package.

Assembling Your Project

The heart of MediaBlitz is the Scoremaker, which uses the timeline concept to score together MIDI, *.wav (sound) files, still images (most formats), sound clips from CDs, animation (most PC formats) and video (Windows Video .avi).

Drop your prepared MIDI music track onto the MIDI time‑bar and you get a block that represents the whole length of the track. Then it's a matter of playing the track and noting the times at which you want your images (or sound or video clips) to appear. One of the few drawbacks in the program is the absence of any way of dropping in position markers by hitting a key whilst the audio is playing. But there are keys to nudge timing of events backwards and forwards by as little as one tenth of a second, so fine tuning at a later stage is relatively straightforward.

Although MediaBlitz is really a 'taster' for multimedia, it's no toy.

Sampled sounds, in the form of *.wav files or audio clips from a CD in your CD‑ROM drive, can be added into the score as easily as cueing in the images. The CD samples are edited into clips by the separate Clipmaker program, which is effectively a non‑destructive editor for sound and animations. The files are topped and tailed by Clipmaker, which then stores the file's location along with new start and stop times, ready for when each clip is called up for playback.

Any image files you wish to incorporate in your presentation can be dropped onto the timeline so that they come up on the screen at the defined time and stay up as long as you've programmed them to. The images can be positioned anywhere by dragging or setting coordinates, so the screen can be filled with images all over the place if that's what turns you on. There are 30 different transition options available — fades, dissolves, zooms, splits, and spirals etc — so images can be swept off the screen in a variety of manners, which makes for greater visual impact than a simple on/off slide.

Complex composite images, with changing background or foregrounds and video inserts, are pretty simple to assemble providing you've thought out what you want to happen beforehand. Video is a bit of problem as off‑the‑shelf Windows *.avi files are hardly thick on the ground or particularly exciting to look at. Things may take a turn for the better when MPEG/White Book video CDs and cards start hitting the shops later this year. Then, in theory, it would be possible to clip high quality music video or film inserts for inclusion into a score. But that's for the future: for now there are quite a few neat little animations available on disk and bulletin boards — although, like public domain MIDI scores, a good percentage of these animations are pretty crass.

Complex scores can be made in separate sections and edited together as one long score that is played out in one long hit. Alternatively, several scores can be strung together and played out sequentially, either as one long event or with the system waiting for a key press before it fires off the next score.

When the creative work is all done, your finished MediaBlitz scores can be played out directly on your own PC. There's even the option to create a single file package that contains all the MIDI, sound, and image elements plus a run‑time version of MediaBlitz. Stick it all on a floppy and you have an instant distribution kit of the full score that will play on any decent PC.

Rounding Off

Although MediaBlitz is really a 'taster' for multimedia, it's no toy. A lot of its tools are basic, but considering the sophistication that multi‑projector slideshows have achieved with fewer functions than MediaBlitz offers, the limiting factor on the finished 'look' of your multimedia score is likely to be your own abilities rather than restrictions in the software.

At £89 MediaBlitz is cheap enough for everyone to experiment with. But if you're still wavering, then the fact that MediaBlitz scores can be used as Windows screensavers may tilt the balance — it also opens up all sorts of customisation possibilities.