Investigating Resources

Investigating the resources for digital media production to figure out the possibilities for a project was a difficult business. There are some places with special hardware and software, but they are spread all over campus and some of them can't be used by students. In the following section I give a list of places I researched:

Scanning images:

flatbed scanners are available at the Arts&Science, Stanley and Physics computer labs. They are connected to a slow Macintosh computer with low screen resolution and restricted number of colors on-screen. Photoshop is there, but in very basic versions. Many students want to use the scanners, and since Photoshop is installed only on the scanner workstations, there is no place to work on the scanned images.

Film scanners are available at the School of Journalism's newsroom, where they are usually busy except early in the morning or after 11pm. Campus Computing's multimedia lab at Memorial Union has a Kodak slide and film scanner, but they reserve their equipment for teachers and staff. The film scanners provide better image quality than the flatbed scanners.

Digitizing sound:

soundcards are available at the Digital Missourian's computer lab, including microphones and cables to connect a tape player. Campus Computing's lab has sound manipulation hardware as well as software, but the restrictions mentioned above apply for sound, too. The education science's multimedia lab offers some sound recording technology. Another place is at the photo department, but it is not accessible for students and usually used for CD rom production. The broadcast department works with digital sound, but I ran out of time researching what could be done with their equipment.

Digitizing video:

can be done at the Education Sciences multimedia lab at Townsend Hall and in Campus Computing's multimedia lab. Restrictions apply, and I cancelled my video plans due to the fact that checking out video equipment requires even more research.

Image manipulation:

software is a big problem. The computer lab's generic Macintosh or PC computer doesn't have any software suitable to create or manipulate images. There are packages like Superpaint on the Macintoshs, but they write exotic image file formats that require additional software to be converted. This software isn't available and would make the image processing even more inconvenient.

Photoshop was another source of problems: it seems that just any of the installations of Photoshop has different drivers, presets or simply runs on machines that don't have enough memory or are too slow. Additional problems show up in the PC environment: the restricted filenames of Windows interfere with the WWW server's long Unix filenames. Installation flaws like having Photoshop for OS/2 but Paintbrush -- the drawing package -- being installed under Windows forcing you to switch between operating systems or to use two computers are adding to the difficulties.

One surprising problem was that a noteable number of paint packages like XPaint, XV of Clearpaint have trouble to create small icon-like images. In the end I had to use Photoshop to create three small 12 by 12 pixel color buttons, once again blocking DigMo's Macintosh.

Missing software like GIF transparency filters, paint packages, image map editors or CGI-scripts are further obstacles.

To conclude, I finally moved to the Silicon Graphics workstations at the Physics Lab, where I was able to compile, install and run a number of X-Windows related applications like XV, XPaint, Mapedit and Giftrans and reprogrammed CGI-programs. Additionally that environment supplied me with a sufficient disk space of 10mb -- three times the space on SHOWME. Even 24 bit high resolution color displays were available.

Surely this is a model for experienced system operators rather than for journalists. Having one place with software that fits to each other, large memory and disk space is essential.