Media convergence, interactivity, retooling for

digital production: As broadcast people surf the waves of change, their training and education needs become complex; if you’re making a training

decision, you can choose from a full suite of

solutions. Whose vision do you follow?

Frank Ogden is having a smart drink. Lounging beside a virtual reality hookup, one eye on an at&t Picasso Still Video Phone, and sipping the all-fruit concoction from the on-site smart bar at Toronto’s Design Exchange, the futurist known as ‘Dr. Tomorrow’ is right at home.

Ogden helped organize ‘A Survival Course for the 21st Century CEO,’ a five-day immersion into the future engineered by The Padulo Institute for Tomorrow, a division of Padulo Integrated.

Survival transformed the Design Exchange into something between a trade show and a research lab, a backdrop for a group of senior executives to become saturated in technologies identified as key to future corporate performance – everything from Internet, nonlinear editing, cd-rom and interactive media to digital document retrieval and the future of computing.

‘The guys at the top are the most vulnerable to technology,’ Ogden told VI midway through the week-long course. ‘They are not aware of what the latest technology is. They don’t know what their company is buying. Being able to dance with electrons is a defensive position for them.

‘With offline nonlinear editing, an ordinary person can make a full-length motion picture,’ says Ogden. ‘Gutenberg made everybody a reader; Xerox made everybody a publisher; now, they can be a television producer. Television will be freed of the dictatorship of the program director. People will live in a five-billion-channel universe.’

The published cost of attending Survival was $5,000, a fee Ogden says no participant questioned.

‘Nobody mentioned money; everybody mentioned time,’ he says. ‘They were upset about taking a week away from their business, but they all made the decision to attend right away. The executive of tomorrow will have to make decisions fast; 40% of all Fortune 500 companies in 1984 no longer exist.’

Dr. Joel Orr, president of Orr Associates and the Virtual World Society, also acting as a resource at the workshop, says digital nonlinear editing will be as important to the future of computing as desktop publishing has been to its recent past.

‘Just as dtp has become universal, nonlinear editing will be de rigeur in everybody’s home computer system,’ Dr. Orr says. ‘Morphing and editing capabilities will come down in price, and people will want to manipulate video images.

‘We are becoming masters of space and time. Put a camera on top of a computer, and allow automatic indexing of audio messages, and you will enable applications like video mail, which can become a main new business communication method,’ says Dr. Orr. ‘We’re always raising the bar. People will expect to see motion soon.’

The presenter of nonlinear editing technology at Survival was Motion Media, a sales, distribution, service and training organization focused on integrating digital media into broadcast, video and animation production and post industries.

The December 1994 startup of Motion Media followed the opening of its partner INSO Inc. (Integrated Solutions), home to a series of vertical-market digital vendors including immedia (multimedia production and training), a document management and imaging division focused on helping extremely paper-intensive organizations, a networking specialist, and a digital prepress division. inso targets corporate, government and education markets.

Becky Posch, a partner at Motion Media, says, ‘We do all of our own sales, service, and support; we’re wholly contained.’

From black to white boxes

For training purposes, that means a classroom full of Macintoshes, and dedicated suites for training in Radius Telecast, Alias PowerAnimator and ElectroGIG, and Aurora Liberty (now officially called Chyron Liberty). Post-training support is handled by Motion Media consultants, backed up by a technical support department equipped to duplicate any hardware/software scenario which comes to them.

Most of the people being trained by Motion Media are moving from black to white boxes – from a proprietary system to software running on a Macintosh, pc or unix workstation.

David Ray Worthington, the other principal of Motion Media, says the transition is not difficult. ‘The end product is still the same. You’ve still got video, you’ve still got audio, and the tasks are still the same.

‘What has changed is the medium over which all this stuff is produced, and that’s where the education process really needs to take place. Proprietary, dedicated hardware is switching over to something that’s screen-based, with generic keyboards.

‘So the biggest thing that we run into during training is getting people to understand the computer platform.

‘Initially, it’s quite scary,’ Worthington says of the move from a black to a white box. ‘You work on a system, everybody else in the industry uses those systems, and maybe you’ve done it for five, 10, 15 years; the system probably hasn’t changed much.

‘All of a sudden you go on to something that just conceptually chucks all that out the window, and takes a lot of the basics but throws it up on the screen. Now you have to learn how to manipulate that screen, and you don’t want to be stuck doing everything with a mouse; there are a lot of key commands that need to be learned.

‘The whole orchestration of how the creative process is done is changing,’ says Worthington. ‘We find operators have a big fear because we’re changing their trade, but like most change, it’s moving forward and is positive change.

‘These systems are now capable of doing much more creatively, and they’re more open as far as designing effects and things that these locked-in systems weren’t able to do.

‘So once people get past the basics, they realize that not only is it a positive change, but it gives a whole new level of creativity to their job function.’

Producers as teachers: IMMpact

inso’s multimedia production division, immpact, also trains organizations getting their feet wet in multimedia.

Paul Michaels, president of immpact, smiles and says, ‘We go with the flow,’ meaning immpact’s training curriculum depends on what you need to know.

‘There’s still a lot of hype, and there’s not a lot that’s actually happening (in multimedia),’ Michaels says. ‘Right now there are a lot of companies who certainly have the capability to do multimedia, but they haven’t done it before. All of a sudden a job comes in, so we get called in, and they want to get up and running fast so they can produce it.’

immedia uses Macromedia Director as its primary authoring tool, citing the ability to write projectors for Windows, Macintosh, and OS2. ‘Right now it’s kind of king of the pile,’ Michaels says. The company also uses a suite of Quicktime video tools; live action is front and center in much of their work.

On the tv side of the interactive front there’s a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario going on. In order to hatch content producers for the ubi consortium’s interactive tv project currently underway in Chicoutimi, Quebec’s Videoway Multimedia is putting together courses.

‘Nobody is doing production in multimedia tv right now,’ says Pierre Dion, the company’s vice-president for sales and marketing, who says that to produce interactive product for tv is very different from the pc-based production that’s currently being done.

The first course will be for advertisers and will cost around $100. Dion expects to see upward of 1,000 media types undergo I-way marketing immersion, which will be held in Toronto, Montreal and Chicoutimi, starting mid-June.

The second stream, six technical courses, will begin late summer/early fall. Geared to production companies which want to become accredited to produce content for the interactive tv delivery system, the courses will cover the hows of producing compatibly for the system. Costs will be higher for the bit-mastering stream.

Who’ll be training the trainers? How-to acumen was acquired by the company’s production department (folks with computer backgrounds, gleaned from production companies), which created all the demos for the system, and who are now ready to pass it on.

Software training from software vendors

For animators, 3D graphics and effects people, training is a more intensive proposition. Side Effects, the software company behind PRISMS 3D animation and effects software, uses the physical resources of F/X Training Corporation in Toronto.

f/x, open just four months, is part of The Kessler Group, Syd Kessler’s new startup; the company also offers training in softimage and Adobe Premiere nonlinear editing software.

Adele Newton, a trainer with Side Effects, says that while training is part of the prisms licence sale, additional training is available at ‘pretty much standard’ costs of approximately $2,500 for a five-day course.

Students normally are working in a production environment, and are experienced with unix, 3D animation software, and have a good working knowledge of animation – an essential combination ‘to avoid getting completely lost after the first day,’ Newton says.

Like most advanced software training scenarios, prisms training begins with the independent completion of a set of tutorials prior to classroom instruction. The class itself is a mix of lecture and hands-on instruction.

Each prisms student receives access to an SGI Indigo2 workstation for the duration of the course. Four or five sessions are scheduled for Toronto this year.

Going public

Colleges and universities are also aggressively pursuing the digital training business, partnering with hardware, software and industry associations. The Bell Centre for Creative Communications, a newly reopened campus of Centennial College in Toronto, lists Bell Canada, Silicon Graphics Canada, Alias Research, Sony of Canada, and the Systems Engineering Society as partners.

With 100 SGI Indys and an SGI Onyx, advanced broadcast facilities and networking capabilities previously unheard of in educational environments, the Bell Centre is the largest educational sgi installation in the world, with a total of $33 million invested in renovation and technology.

Nate Horowitz, co-ordinator of imaging and computer graphics at the center, believes sgi will continue to dominate the world of digital broadcast technology, at least in the near term.

‘For a while they’re going to remain the tool of choice, based on speed, and ability. You have to go by the vision of the company. You have to bet on the human beings, not their hardware or software. You will find people at sgi who are very forward-looking, particularly focused, and understanding of their markets,’ Horowitz says. ‘But it’s a high-tech industry, so you never know for sure.’

Horowitz says the one thing colleges can do is teach a combination of basic skills and specific software, something situational trainers have trouble with.

‘I would like to see vars (value added resellers) have a variety of people that you could turn to later for training and technical support. The var people are very focused on training you on a piece of software, but they do not deal with communication issues. And you’re buying this device to deal with communications problems and issues. They can’t teach you that.’

One thing everybody agrees on is the change in the way people teach.

Says Ogden: ‘Teachers are obsolete. We must move to a learning environment. People need to learn how to go down the jungle trail, and find the information they need.’

The British Columbia Institute of Technology is positioning itself to respond to the challenges of that jungle with a new media facility designed to foster partnerships and collaborative projects with private-sector companies.

BCIT Media Studio, under the direction of Robert MacDonald, longtime director of the Banff Publishing Workshop, and Zdenek Vintr, is focused on publishing – providing a resource for organizations ready to move from paper to electronic delivery of information.

IMAT: a clearing house for information

At the beginning of the year, the Canadian Computer Graphics Association merged with the International Multimedia Development Association to form imat, the Interactive Multimedia Arts and Technology Association. The move brings the arts and technology sides of multimedia together under one umbrella.

Marcia Olmsted, vice-president of the imat education committee, says, ‘There’s a need to bring together different players around life-long learning and multimedia. We’ve set ourselves up as a clearing house, a place where people can communicate and be connected to each other.

‘All the training organizations out there are starting to compete aggressively, and that’s good news for the consumer. There are college programs just springin’ up like mushrooms right now,’ Olmsted says.

‘The other side is private-sector training and we’re trying to bring those people together with people who need their services.

‘Through the Internet we’re saying, `If you have a job, post it on our World Wide Web or gopher site. If you want to discuss issues around learning about multimedia, use our Listserve program which is being set up. If you want a job, post your resume. If you offer training, put up information about what you do and the buyers can decide who’s the best.’ We’re trying to be this communication center for all these different groups.’

As technology changes the business landscape of broadcasting, the people in and around the industry must also redefine their roles. ‘People are starting to say, `I’m a media person, or a multimedia person, and this is the kind of output I produce,’ as opposed to tying themselves to the traditional technology,’ Olmstead says. ‘So their whole approach to who they are, how to identify themselves, and how to sell themselves – these are the softer skills that have to be built into training, too. I’ve realized you can’t just stay in one little industry anymore.’

Ross Maddever is a longtime digital media buff/graphic designer and a part-time instructor at the Bell Centre for Creative Communications.