Astound Software

 

"Studio M" for multimedia composition

"Video-Jr," a consumer video editor

 

A fortuitous and spontaneous shared taxi ride in Tokyo with Astound CEO Kailash Ambwani lead to multi-product product design partnership. Form and Function was invited to rethink a consumer oriented interface for Astound's non-linear video editing system known as Video Director.

This $199 product connected one's home VCR to Computer to Camcorder with a few wires and some software. This enabled the general populace to log their handy-cam clips, compose edit-lists, and output the result for dubbing to the VCR. The system prompts for each source tape as the edit list demands so that the user is left holding a freshly compiled videotape ready to please an eager grandmother. Like many video-related companies, the hope was that anybody could tame this technology and Grandmother would soon be pumping out their video diaries, a kinda-sorta proto-podcast. In reality, few people had the patience to hook this gear up and follow ocassionally tedious trouble-shooting procedures w/o becoming catatonic at the thought of breaking their computer even slightly. Our implicit goal became to make this product easy enough for Grandad to feel comfortable doing with our product what his nerd son had done with the previous one, dubbed VideoDirector "Senior".

Although we embrace the endearing 20-in-1 Engineering Kit look of the previous version, we wiped nostalgic tears away with ozone-calloused hands and turned our hardened hearts to the future. The struggle ahead required hammer and tongs to curb the creeping featur-itus favored by clever engineering minds. Out of this tempest forged something simpler, stronger, to find a wider do-it-yourself TV audience, longer lifecycle, and it's greatest value. Mimicking the camcorder for device control reduced the learning curve and appeared to ease anxious new uses. Drag and drop editing worked well as either picture icon clips or text organizing datum as extensible titles in scrapbooks. The end result was a strong and useful product for a wider assortment of customers.

Son of VideoDirector

Drum roll... the VideoDirector interface reborn as, "Junior" In the end, our light and deceptively simple interface held the conceit that this corner of your PC was an area on a small shelf in Dad's den. Gone were the Japanese-stereo button over-kill style read-outs and overlapping technical windoid debris in favor of fixed functional layouts done in warm cartoon tones that animate and give audio feedback. This was fun to illustrate, although the sudden 4-bit {a mere sixteen colors} animation & artwork requirement after final delivery was a stretch to the schedule, but this allowed legacy Windows 1.0 users to partake. The colorful illustrated functional elements were extrapolated from simple everyday objects for familiarity and always reflected a domestic backdrop with as low-tech a thresh-hold as we could possibly convey. Amp-ing up the artistic laser heat-vision we tempered the spec until the engineering-heavy previous version megaHertz.

 

Unlike the Senior screenshot with it's row of picture-clip icons for composing an edit list our VideoDirector-JR specification required us to assume no hardware input was available. Freeing future would-be Blair Witch Project wanna-bees from hardware input add-on cards {and each with it's own attendant arcane settings} was initially jeered by the more forward leaning of the team {ahem, aforementioned featuritus} since motherboards were expected to deliver such digital video all-too soon. This all meant a lower-cost entry for the consumer to start making clip lists and dumping their Camcorder footage to hi-lights it was the clip would play in the television screen. In the end this spare approach forced a simpler metaphor and interface that older people could sort through well being somewhat akin to any reel-to-reel expectations an older public had.

 

Studio M multimedia authoring

Refocusing a feature-rich set of capabilities to address retail home & hobby market. OEM purchasers of the Astound presentation engine asked for a simpler, easy-to-navigate, product winnowed down from the rich library their full-featured product. Mission: Re-design the interface of a rich, time-tested, desktop presentation tool for ever-simpler "Mom-n-Pop" multimedia authoring. Astound had grown in popularity as a MicroSoft PowerPoint alternative and computer manufacturers were asking for more variations. As it aged, ad-hoc customer requests & engineering control of the user experience had allowed the interface to become convoluted, dense, recursive and too often confusing. The original Astound interface: Who knew what recursive nested dialog boxes awaited? Computer graphics were just flexing their 8-bit muscle on the desktop and managers were looking for rich textures and funky data to fill up the newfangled CD-ROM and make their fare tastier than the competition. We obliged. Main assembly area with provided template Form and Function's job was to sort out the various work-flow pathways and chart a cleaner interface. This involved notepad cyphers filled with lists wrapped in bubbles pierced by call-out arrows leading from diagrams ruminating on functional cul-de-sacs next to shortcuts simplifying Gordian Knots of logical synergy.

 

Group consensus on this project had already gelled with a point of view that customers needed to be strongly guided through a template structure before Form and Function was invited into the cola strewn labs. This was an unfortunate, but acceptable constriction, that would have been argued further if the budget supported such a luxury, but we came a tad late to the discussion and made the best of it.

As time flows, markets shift, people move on, and the immortal assets become stale and change hands leaving brittle frozen code discarded upon the dusty CD-ROM tracks of archived application libraries laying fallow ...who knows where-away the intellectual property of this anymore?

Last seen heading ...

 

"VideoDirector" and "Studio M" crews:
Allen Thygesen - Executive
Marshall Goldberg - Product Manager
Jonathan Gibson - Designer
Jennie Gale - Work-Flow + Logic