How to Spot the Charlatans

Poor Layout

Recently I was asked by a local artist to look at her website and tell her why nobody could find it in Google. Here was a website that felt wrong even before I checked out the source code. It was a fixed-size design which was centred horizontally but not vertically – an early sign of laziness on the part of the designer. But that was nothing compared to what I was about to uncover.

No SEO

There were no keywords in the metatags, so naturally some of the major search engines were severely disadvantaged. How could they rank a web page which didn't have the keywords by which it was supposed to be measured? This was the "index" page, otherwise known as the "home" or "landing" page which I was looking at, the most important page for search engine optimisation (SEO), and I was at once both upset for the artist concerned and angry on my own behalf with whoever had put this monstrosity together.

Old-Style Ignorance

But it was worse than I suspected. What appeared to be text in this first page had in fact been flattened into an image file so there was no legible text for search engine bots to scan. There are also serious implications here regarding accessibility – partially sighted people using text readers would find a blank page!

This same page used Tables for formatting its layout rather than Divisions, and a ridiculous image map for navigation. These techniques have been deprecated for years and in this case had turned what should have been a short bit of clean code into an auto-generated nightmare.

Exposed Email Address

The remainder of the website was no better: a thumbnail image gallery which could only show the larger image in a new blank page which had to be closed before one could select the next image, and a contact page with an unprotected email address ripe for attack by harvesters (evil bots which scan such sites to add email addresses to their databases for spamming purposes). Luckily for my new client, the email address associated with her old site had a permanent error and any email sent to it was being automatically returned to the sender, so at least she hadn't been inundated with spam!

Computer Experts

I won't name names, but suffice it to say that these local "computer experts" should know better than to state on their own website: "We optimise your site for Google and all other major search engines". They should be ashamed of themselves.

What to Do

If you are looking for a proper website that will work for you, please see my earlier post How to Choose a Web Designer.

You should also find a web page that your prospective web designer has already designed and look at its "source" (via "view" in your browser menu}. Within the "head" tags near the top of the source code you should find a meta tag named "keywords" which should include a list of relevant key words for that particular page. Often (and in the case I mention above) they are absent.

Check also that the text you see in your browser window is actually present in the "source" code. If it's not, it has probably been flattened into an image and is invisible to Google and all other search engines!

The Three-Click Rule

What is the Three-Click Rule?

The Three-Click Rule applies to all multimedia presentations, including websites, DVD-video menus, CD-ROM productions, Enhanced CD productions, computer games, and any other interactive project you can imagine which needs some kind of navigation.

If you can't navigate from any part of your presentation to any other part within three clicks of the mouse button you have failed in your design. And nobody likes "back" links!

If your project doesn't follow this rule it wasn't properly thought out, which probably means that whoever designed it isn't properly trained in multimedia engineering.

And you've probably created a monster!

RTF – Rich Text Format

I've often been asked by clients what I mean when I say that I expect all texts to be supplied in RTF format.

I'm not a typist, and my quotes don't include the time it would take for retyping printed text. I could employ a typist, of course, but so long as texts created on your computer are saved as RTF (Rich Text Format) files, they can be opened in any other text-editing program (on Macs as well as on PCs) and then copied and pasted easily into any other text-editing program or (X)HTML editor.

The RTF format should be your format of choice if you expect other people to be able to open and read your text files. This means not simply "Saving" your text files, but using the "Save As" option and choosing the RTF format as the format in which to save your text files.

The RTF format, due to its cross-platform compatibility, should be your file format of choice for text files regardless of the type of computer, operating system, or text editor you are using.

Misadventures in Sound and Vision II

What's Wrong with my Sounds?

I'm quite happy listening to my CDs, but would much rather be listening to DVD-Audio (DVD-A).

Back in 1999 when I was studying to be a multimedia engineer there was a lot of enthusiasm for the new DVD-A format, and for good reason. CD-quality audio is delivered by sampling and reproducing sounds at a bit-depth of 16 bits (that's the amount of data recorded per single sample), at a rate of 44.1 kHz (44100 samples per second).

DVD-A uses 24-bit samples at sample rates of up to 192 kHz (192000 samples per second). This is all rather dry data, but if you ever get a chance to do an A-B comparison you'll be blown away by the extra clarity (due to the increased sample rate) and dynamic range (due to the increased bit-depth) of DVD-A.

So what went wrong? Record companies didn't release very much in the DVD-A format. I don't really know why. Unless, of course, they were already thinking in terms of sending us in the opposite direction, away from quality and towards quantity. Oh yeah, maybe they were looking at the possibility of using the lossy MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 format (an outmoded and noisy method of compressing sound in digital movies) which we now all know as mp3.

I guess there was a high-level meeting of multinational company executives that went something like this:

A: This DVD-A thing really rocks, eh?
B: Have you any idea of how much it's going to cost us to resample all our top-sellers in the required format?
A: No, but the quality...
C: Never mind the quality, look at these forecasts...
B: Yes we see much better profits using this dodgy mp3 compression and just selling the lower quality item online - the files are really small!
C: And they'll all want these new wee mp3 players that will make them so deaf they won't notice the difference...

Misadventures in Sound and Vision I

What's Wrong with this Picture?

I cropped the image above to the aspect ratio 16:9, which is fine, I think, for a small still image. But what if the image was projected onto a wall and was 6 metres wide? And what about this crop (2.39:1)?



The image above is cropped to one of the more common aspect ratios now being used by the movie industry, and it's getting rather abstract, don't you think? Widecreen was invented by Hollywood when cinema audiences started to plummet due to the increasing popularity of televisions.

Televisions used to display at 4:3, movies were made to the same format, and stills cameras shot film to this very same aspect ratio. Why? Because 4:3 is the best approximation of how we actually see the world. It's the most natural, realistic aspect ratio you'll ever see.



I love movies made in this format. 8mm and 16mm films were shot at 4:3, Dogme 95 movie-makers continue to use 4:3, and I still shoot video in the same format.

Millions of recent Home Cinema System owners will disagree, but widescreen is a con. It's another step away from reality.

What's that Noise?

Yesterday evening I arrived home from a weekend at the Scottish Healing Centre to find several messages on the telephone answering machine from my wife Genie. She's in Holland at the moment and I'd forgotten to mention that I'd be out for the weekend. Picking up the phone all I could hear was loud static. I fiddled with the leads and then tried plugging the unit directly into the telephone socket in the wall, bypassing the splitter for the broadband line. More white noise, so I used my mobile phone (which I hardly ever use) to send a clumsy SMS to Genie explaining the problem with the land line, and went to bed.

This morning during a meeting with Robin (of Robin Baker Architects) I mentioned the trouble I was having with the telephone. What was bugging me was the fact that Genie's messages on the answering machine were clear, so it seemed that the "line in" was good but the "line out" was noisy, and I didn't know whether it was the telephone itself or the line to my house that was at fault. Robin let me borrow his fax machine, which has a telephone handset built in, in order to test the line at home.

Plugging in the fax machine at home I found the telephone line to be clear, and as the outside line was obviously fine, I resolved to buy a new pair of cordless phones online, once I'd finished the work I'd started on my trusty Mac. But as I was about to send an email...

There was a power outage. Even as the computer was shutting down there was an almighty crash of thunder. Heavy rain. Time for lunch, I thought.

After lunch I turn the Mac back on. No wireless connection. Of course, this always happens after a power cut. It's a drag but I know it's only a question of resetting first the router and then the wireless hub and all will be well, although Robin had to replace his router after it got fried by a lightning strike just a couple of weeks ago...

Finally I get the network up and running and am at the stage where I'm ready to order a new phone online. Now something prompts me to check the phone one last time and lo and behold I have a clear line! Everything works.

I'm guessing that the problem with the phone was due to the fact that it's a cordless system that uses radio signals. The signals were probably being messed up by atmospheric static which was cleared by the electrical storm. But at the same time I'm wondering whether simply turning the power to the phone off and on might have fixed it.

If you've had similar adventures with your cordless phone, please let me know.

Starting Life as a Multimedia Engineer

Stranger in a Strange Land

Twelve years ago I was unemployed and living in Holland, having been made redundant from a fine job editing online biomedical journals for a well known multinational science publisher. I'd worked for 16 years in advertising and publishing, in London and in Amsterdam, but my real love had always been mucking around with computers, making music, videos, graphics, games, and writing for magazines such as MicroMusic. Twelve years ago I was clinically depressed.

Then one day my wife Genie pointed out an advertisement in a computer magazine for courses at the new College of Multimedia (CMM) in Amsterdam, to which I was unresponsive at first. Then I started to think about it and looked at the advertisement more carefully. The technology had reached a stage where even video could be digitally captured and edited. The World Wide Web was coming of age, and here was something I could actually enthuse about: Multimedia. So that's what they were calling what I'd been playing around with since the early 1980s!

I went to a CMM open day and spoke to some of the students. There was a real buzz going. Although I'd been advised that with my background in science and experience with sound engineering I could probably skip Multimedia Level 1, talking to Level 1 students convinced me that if I was going to get into this I'd want to start at the beginning. There were clearly gaps in my knowledge that Level 1 would sort out, and although my Dutch was fluent the fact that the courses were going to be in Dutch suggested that I might need the extra 6 months to get a better understanding of the technical language that would be involved.

It was hard work but my tutors and fellow students were always helpful. The Macs we were using then would take hours to render a movie of just a couple of minutes' duration, and there was a lot of practical work on which we were assessed as well as regular theory tests, but we were all enthusiastic and the results were most satisfying. I had a ball. Eighteen months later I got my diploma.

New Media and all that

Since qualifying as a Multimedia Engineer I've seen a lot of so-called New Media firms come and go. Many of these were run by accountants and salesmen, with little knowledge of the job of producing multimedia, and there was an attitude amongst them that all you needed was a copy of Dreamweaver, for example, and you could "do web design". We weren't allowed to use such drag-and-drop programs at CMM – they produced bloated (and often contradictory) code and weren't to be trusted. You'd have to know how to program first, then you could look at pages generated by Dreamweaver and be able to correct them. Many firms fooled themselves and their clients for some time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time...

Some people are simply too lazy to "do multimedia engineering". It's hard work and you really have to be "into it". You constantly have to study to keep your skills up to date. Some people have played at it and been out of their depth, at their clients' expense, which has ultimately reflected on the good guys who tend to get tarred with the same brush. Many are stuck in a niche, designing websites, for instance, only in Flash, which I would not recommend to my clients, despite the fact that it's fun to do.

So if you're thinking about a career in multimedia and you don't mind hard work, go for it. But please be honest with yourself. And with your clients!

Sound Insulation

Sound travels more readily through solids than it does through air, as demonstrated in old Western movies by the fellow with his ear to the railway track giving advance notice of oncoming trains. This has practical implications when soundproofing a room.

Air is actually the best insulator of sound, so if we're concerned about external sound getting into the studio or our own sounds leaking out, we need to trap air between solid layers in the walls, floor and ceiling, to provide good sound insulation. Regardless of the materials used for the inner surfaces, any struts or batons joining them to the external walls, floor and ceiling, will themselves transmit sound.

Optimal sound insulation can be achieved by floating a room within the room on tennis balls. This way there is very little solid connection between the inner and outer rooms, but a lot of insulating air. In fact anything which traps air will dampen sound transmission, so foam acoustic tiles, or even cardboard egg boxes, glued or tacked to the walls and ceiling, and thick carpets on the floor, will help.

Audio 101

Bearing in mind that sound is made up of travelling compression waves, let's look again at our sine wave model, in which the horizontal axis represents time.











The speed at which sound travels through air is a constant, 343 m/s at 20°C and at sea level, although this value varies slightly according to altitude and temperature.

Let λ be the wavelength (in metres),
let f be the sound frequency (full waves per second, Hertz),
and let c be the speed of sound (a constant) measured in metres per second.

λ = c / f

With this simple formula we can work out the wavelength of a sound, so long as its frequency is known. Or we can work out the frequency of a sound having a particular wavelength.

When setting up a recording studio it is important to take precautions against standing waves, which is when the wavelength of a sound coincides with the dimensions of the room, in which case the entire room vibrates at the frequency of that particular wave. The frequency of the standing wave can be predicted by first measuring the room (in metres) and then applying the formula above.

Unless precautions are taken, mixing down sounds with a standing wave in the studio will produce a mix which will sound completely different when played back in another room, as the standing wave will have been compensated for on the mixing desk, and that same frequency will be sadly lacking in the actual sounds that were mixed down.

We can reduce the effect of standing waves by breaking up parallel surfaces. I've found that wall-mounted shelves lined with books of different sizes (and whatever else comes to hand) is a tidy way of breaking up flat walls. Heavy curtains also help. Once you've done the physical work, using a parametric equalizer on your amplifier should take care of the rest. To set it up, listen to a CD of something you know really well and adjust the equalizer until it sounds just right. The next time you mix down a track you won't be compensating for standing waves!

What is Sound?

Sound is made up of travelling compression waves, or oscillations in pressure.

Acoustics is the scientific study of sound.

Audio is sound within the frequency range which can be heard by human beings, which is generally considered to be between 12 Hz (Hertz: cycles per second) and 20,000 Hz (or 20 kHz). It's this audible range of sound frequencies that I'll be concerned with here.

We experience the frequency of a sound as its pitch: the higher the sound frequency, the higher the pitch (or note if we're talking about music). Some sounds are of too high a frequency to be heard by human ears (ultrasound) and some too low (infrasound). Think of a dog whistle, and then of the serious health concerns of people living too close to industrial wind turbines – Vibro-Acoustic Disease is caused by infrasound noise being transmitted through the ground.





Here is a simplified graphic representation of sound. One whole sound wave is shown, the horizontal axis representing time, and the vertical axis representing the oscillation in pressure from compression (+) to decompression, or rarefaction (−). It is a sine wave, or single pure tone, which doesn't actually exist in nature, but is useful in helping us to understand sound.

Which Browser?

I'm often asked which web browser I use for my work and usually answer, all of them. I want the web pages I make to look and behave the same in all current browsers, so I use them all to test my work.

Although I use Macs for production work, I do have a PC laptop running various versions of Internet Explorer (IE) which I also use for testing. This shouldn't be necessary but IE was never truly standards compliant, which means that I usually end up writing extra (redundant) code to make my pages look the way they should have done to start with. Having said that, IE8 does behave better then earlier incarnations, but still has a long way to go. I'm sure that the internet would have evolved into a far more beautiful place if only Microsoft had properly implemented web standards in their ubiquitous browser. There are many web designers out there who would love to use some of the new features offered by CSS3, for example, but won't do so until IE actually supports them.

So which browser do I prefer? I've been using Mozilla's Firefox for some years, Apple's Safari being a little too quirky for my liking, especially in the way it renders text. It's also good to know that Firefox is open source software with hundreds of dedicated programmers across the world involved in its development. Support the good guys, I say. Failing that, Google's Chrome is very fast and offers lots of support for fancy HTML5 stuff.

I would urge anyone still using IE to try Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, and see which they prefer. These are small downloads (my last Opera download was 13.9 MB) and quick to install. You can usually import bookmarks from another browser, and you don't have to set any of them as your default browser until you are sure which one you prefer, so what do you have to lose?

Try testing your browsers on Ernest Delgado's excellent HTML5 website demonstration!

How to Choose a Web Designer

What Makes a Good Website?

A well designed website can be standards compliant and affordable.

What constitutes good design is debatable, but when designing for the web there are guidelines which designers ignore at their risk.

Text should be easy to read. This means starting with a reasonable font size and using text columns which are not too wide to scan – the eye tires quickly from reading long lines of text and has difficulty picking up the start of the next line. Text columns should have margins wide enough to give the eye a resting place, and should have a neutral and contrasting background colour. Body text should never appear above a photographic image.

Graphics including logos should be crisp and have clean edges, yet how often do we see graphics with jagged edges?

Photographic images don't have to be big to be beautiful, but whatever the size they should be sharp and clear and properly optimised for the web to ensure fast download times.

Your website should reflect your own business and be a one-off – not built to a template which has been used tens of thousands of times. The interface should be transparent (so obvious that the user doesn't have to think about how to get from page to page) and follow the Three-Click Rule: you should be able to navigate from any page on the website to any other page within three clicks of the mouse. Don't be surprised if you've never heard of the latter – many so-called web designers are also unaware of it.

Any commercial website should also be cross-platform compatible: it should look the same and perform properly in all current browsers whether they are running on a Mac or PC.

Check the Track Record

Take your time. Have a good look online at any web pages that the designer has already made. Ask yourself the following:

Is it easy on the eye?
Is the text legible?
Is it a fast download ?
Are the pages consistent across the website?
Does it work in all my browsers?
Was it built using XHTML or old-fashioned HTML?

HTML or XHTML?

HTML (hypertext mark-up language) has been deprecated for years, yet websites are still being built using HTML. This is mainly because some people are still using old drag-and-drop applications to generate their web pages, despite the fact that these programs are notorious for generating bloated code (slower to download).

A future-proof website will be coded using XHTML (eXtensible HTML) and will be hand-coded (ideally) to ensure fast download times. Now that Google is starting to include the speed at which a web page downloads in their calculation of its page rank, it will be interesting to see what happens to the rankings of those old-fashioned HTML sites.

Luckily you don't have to be a programmer to be able to tell the difference between a website built using HTML and one built using the recommended XHTML. The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C, the people responsible for developing web standards) have their excellent Markup Validation Service which is available to everyone. To check whether a web page was made using XHTML or HTML:

1) click on the link above;

2) copy the web address of the page you want to check into the Address field;

3) click on the Check button.

Not only will you see whether the web page validates as HTML or XHTML, but you will also see any errors in the way the page was coded. Try it out on any page from this website to see how any proper web page should validate:

RobinBakerArchitects.com

Multimedia and the Engineer

When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually answer "I'm a multimedia engineer" and watch their eyes glaze over. Further attempts to explain what I do are usually met with more blank looks and a change in the subject of conversation. I persevere.

The media in the word multimedia are audio, video, text, graphics and photographic images. A multimedia engineer brings these elements together to make an interactive production, such as a website, CD-ROM or DVD. The bringing together of these elements is often called authoring.

With this blog I intend to share some of the basic theory behind multimedia engineering. Please let me know how I'm doing by leaving comments.