Where do we come from?

3TMAN, short for an easy Multimedia Authoring tool for everyoNe, is a graphical multimedia integration and synchronization authoring tool. It is origin from the research work about a multimedia toolbox called Kaomi and a multimedia composition and synchronization model called Madeus of the Opera project at INRIA Rhône-Alpes. You can also find here more detail information about these researches.

What formats can 3TMAN export to?

The underlying format of 3TMAN is XML format; therefore it can be easily transformed into any other underlying XML multimedia format including HTML+Time, SMIL, MMS, HTML, XMT-O, etc.. In addition it can be exported into executable formats such as Java Application/Applet applications.

What is deferences between 3TMAN and current multimedia integration authoring tools ?

3TMAN is based on a multimedia authoring schema, that allows to hide from authors all complexities from multimedia synchronization and integration technologies. It also provides several common multimedia integration structure such as talk, game, test, courseware, etc., that can help authors to create complex multimedia projects easily. Authors can then choose to export their multimedia projects to different standard multimedia presentations.

In addition, 3TMAN is integrated a video and an audio content description tools, that allows rapid identification of relevant information(video/audio segment or video objects, etc.) for multimedia fine-grained integration. By example, the users can use audio/video content description tool to describe and to visualize a summary of an audio/video, since the audio/video content browser integrated into 3TMAN, the summary of audio/video can be easily integrated into a multimedia document, just by a drag and drop action. This is just a simple example, we can imagine others examples such as rapidly extracting any audio/video portion for authoring multimedia even the video objects (moving region); or making fine-grained synchronization (karaoke); or making effects on video/audio portions, by example, video object hyperlink, video object tracking or even deleting.

How about Macromedia Director?

Macromedia Director provides a powerful graphical interface to create professional multimedia content and applications for CDs, DVDs, kiosks, and the Web. 3TMAN allows to create more structured multimedia presentations. So if you have a big multimedia project, you can create it and manage it more easily with 3TMAN. In addition, 3TMAN is based on XML format, so it provides more interoperable capacity, i.e., it is easier to reuse, to transform 3TMAN multimedia projects into different formats including SMIL, HTML, HTML+Time, XMT-O, MMS, Java application, etc.

If I want to author a particular multimedia presentation, the structure of which is not provided by 3TMAN, how can I do?

3TMAN provides a generic multimedia structure (GenericScene) to author common multimedia presentations. However to author specific multimedia presentations such as slideshow, auto-presentation, test, new, etc. the structures more relevant to each specific multimedia presentation will make authoring much more easily. 3TMAN therefore also provides a set of predefined specific multimedia structures including Menu, Slideshow, and Welcome structures. We have planed to implement more others specific structures: Test, and Investigation. If you need the others particular multimedia structures for your multimedia project, please contact us, and provide us all of your requests! We will quickly study and provide you with the particular multimedia structures appropriate to your multimedia project.