Let's Work Together
Rich Media Recording Tools
The last set of tools is the one most familiar to the Streaming Media audience. While these tools don’t quite measure up to the product categories already mentioned, they are the underlying rich media foundation for all the other collaborative tools we’ve looked at, and they are the tools with the greatest potential, when combined with other collaborative computing tools.
One of the areas that has been most vexing in collaborative computing is the ability to share a full-motion desktop in real time; the bandwidth/timeliness trade-off has often resulted in 3–5fps at VGA or higher resolutions, or 10fps at video-only resolutions. The attempt to attain high-resolution screen captures while at the same time collaborating on rich media applications, such as video editing or graphic design programs, remains elusive, but hope is in sight.
One reason that rich media recording tools, such as Accordent’s or Sonic Foundry’s products, have had limited success in reaching full-motion frame rate levels is technical; the other reason is business-driven. The technical issue is that still-image frame-grabbers are used to provide high-resolution captures of an attached laptop or desktop; the business issue is that the use of these products has been limited to basic lecture recording, with an occasional chat or poll thrown in.
This limitation, building on the limitations of the original T.120 standard as a low-bandwidth collaborative technology, means that a large group of potential users, those who need full- or near-full-motion frame rates (including artists, architects, game designers, etc.), have not been able to use collaborative computing tools.
To address the needs of the creative class and content producers, who often collaborate in the creation of their products much more than the typical enterprise or business customer does, companies such as Adobe and TechSmith are acquiring or creating products for this market. These tools, designed to work on any machine, not only those connected to a rich media recorder, address high-frame rate screen captures as well as collaborative computing.
An example from TechSmith is SnagIt, a byproduct of the Camtasia and EnSharpen high-resolution, high-motion codecs that TechSmith has developed over the years. It is designed for screen captures but has slowly been finding its way into other products, such as Anystream Apreso. Adobe has Captivate, a product designed for educators to capture screens for on-demand playback, and it has Visual Communicator 3, which provides live Flash Video streaming capabilities.
While Adobe hasn’t released Captivate as a collaborative tool yet, and may have no plans to do so, it has at least begun trending toward software-as-a-service models with its online version of Premiere and the online version of Photoshop it demoed at MAX 2007 in October. It’s not such a hard leap, then, to see products from Accordent, SonicFoundry, and Adobe becoming true collaborative computing tools. Each would fit its own key niche of usage cases, and each might have key industries adopt their products (or services, if Adobe continues its trend toward the service model), but these enhanced video communication tools and the tools that go along with them, such as metadata and keyword search functions, could actually move collaborative computing past the issues of incrementally expanding on 10-year-old innovations and instead move into full collaborative models that address anytime-anywhere computing that is as functional on corporate intranets as it is on the laptop or mobile phone of the corporate road-warrior.
Who knows; it might even make your intrafamily remote tech support a little easier as you help your father figure out the best transition to use for the newest video slideshow he’s creating from your children’s pictures.