Authoring 744: Writing Descriptions to Create Content

1 and MPEG-7 2 standards provide new ways for authoring, transporting, access-ing, retrieving, and interacting with multimedia content. MPEG-4 is the first standard that supports interactive and complex audio–visual presentations , while MPEG-7 standardizes the description of various types of multimedia content. Complex authoring tools are required to create the powerful reusable and interactive content allowed by MPEG-4. On the other hand, MPEG-7 describes content in a more natural manner. Currently , MPEG-7 applications extract the characteristic features of some existing content to generate a standardized description of it. This is the straightforward way of using MPEG-7, but it may be also possible to synthesize the content from such descriptions. This article introduces the first results of the Authoring 744 research initiative, which uses MPEG-7 to synthesize content instead of analyzing it. Authoring 744 aims to develop a prototype system that creates audio–visual content through writing scripts and descriptions in a user-friendly GUI. By script writing we mean completing forms and choosing some media description examples (such as a melody's key, an object's shape and texture or its trajectory within the scene, and a region's dominant color). Authoring 744 mostly provides an alternative multimedia authoring methodology that's simpler than traditional authoring tools and more human focused. Of course, this vision may yield (in most cases) only drafts of the audio–visual content that will bring the author's idea to reality, but it will ease the quick creation of initial prototypes such as advertisement images, soundtracks, jingles, sto-ryboards for a TV pilot series, publicity/music video clips, and so on. Nevertheless, in some cases, it should be possible to create final content. In fact, the synthesized content uses extensible MPEG-4 textual format A (XMT-A), which is part of MPEG-4's XMT, 3 as the representation format. XMT-A is a textual representation of MPEG-4 using XML, 4 which provides a direct one-to-one mapping between MPEG-4 elements in both binary and textual representation formats. In the field of computer games, Authoring 744 could also be useful. A key asset for the design of any game is a toolset for content creation and conversion , providing artists with flexible solutions to recycle already existing 4D content to create new content. Among the tools in such a toolset, it would make a lot of sense to have one that semi-automatically synthesizes content from MPEG-7 descriptions. This would not only save design time, but also storage space, as it …