Copyright costs for text, images, audio, and animationIntroducing multimedia data resources creates additional challenges for application developers. A key issue in creating multimedia titles is managing the many data elements—text files, audio files, bitmaps, and animations—used within a title. Multimedia data resources are expensive in many ways:
Copyright costs for text, images, audio, and animation
Workhour costs of preparing the resources—converting from analog sources, translating different file formats, editing the resource, and the time involved in each step
Storage costs since audio, images, and animations require lots of disk storage
Effectively managing the data used to build a title can help control the costs of multimedia application development. Data management is a key part of creating multimedia applications, but it isn't really a step in the process—it underlies the process. You'll want a data management system in place when you start collecting your first set of images and sounds.
This chapter introduces some of the concepts and issues you should consider when figuring how to manage the data used in your multimedia title.