Company announces software tools, licensing agreements to open standards

Members from Eastman Kodak’s Photo CD Imaging Group have not been sleeping much lately. For the past few months the technical and communications team responsible for the development and evangelism of Kodak’s Photo CD digital imaging technology have been on the road demonstrating some of Kodak’s new Photo CD hardware and software tools and trying to build strategic partnerships and licensing agreements with computer companies, consumer device manufacturers, and applications and hardware vendors.

In short, the company is immersed in an aggressive campaign to open up the Photo CD standard and encourage the native adoption of Photo CD at the operating system level on a variety of devices. Already, Philips CD-I and certain members of the Macintosh, Atari and Acorn families of CD-ROM-based computers can access, read and display Photo CD discs — without requiring any external software or hardware from Kodak. The 3DO Company says it plans to provide system-level support for Photo CD in its Interactive Multiplayer consumer device as well.

In addition Kodak has been wooing several other major computer and consumer electronics companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Commodore and Hitachi to build support for Photo CD into their next-generation system-level software technology or consumer device. If these powerhouses were to adopt Photo CD at the system level — and several of them are expected to make announcements to that effect in the not-too-distant future — Kodak’s Photo CD might very well become the first de facto digital imaging standard.

AN INTERACTIVE SPIN FOR DESKTOP PUBLISHERS

In the meantime, however, Kodak does not plan to sit on its hands and wait. The company, which has been fighting to create a demand for its Photo CD technology since it was announced in 1990, has announced plans to deliver several Photo CD hardware and software tools that will potentially enable commercial publishers and business presenters to use their existing computer systems and software to publish Photo CDs from the desktop.

Authoring software package. By this fall, Kodak plans to ship its own authoring software for the Photo CD multimedia format called Portfolio. Primarily used for entertainment viewing including slide shows and interactive media titles such as Rick Smolan’s From Alice to Ocean, Portfolio discs can hold up to 800 display-resolution images, or one hour of CD audio, or a combination of images, audio, graphics and text.

The Portfolio authoring software includes three distinct applications: an image packer, which initially will convert only TIFF files to the Photo CD format but the company says support for PICT is soon to follow; a copy/merge module, which enables individuals to copy Photo CD image packs from one Photo CD to another, maintaining Photo CD playback compatibility; and a portfolio organizer module, which is similar to the Composing Window in Macromedia’s MediaMaker post-production software.

Portfolio also provides the tools for an individual to combine the audio, text and images to build a story board for a multimedia presentation or title. Kodak’s organizer can organize the information with linear and non-linear sequencing.

Still need a Sparcstation. Initially the software will be Unix-based and will run only on a Sun Sparcstation, since that’s the original production system that Photo CD was designed for, but Kodak says it plans to port the technology to the Macintosh by September. The company also says it will develop the software for the Microsoft Windows multimedia PC platform, although no time frame for delivery on that platform has been announced.

Kodak is not selling this technology cheap. The packaging of authoring tools will be bundled with a $5,995 writable CD-ROM drive. The total price of the hardware/software bundle will probably be just less than $8,000. Publishers will still need to purchase or own the Sparcstation.

Kodak claims it will sell Photo CD Portfolio format discs for about $25. (Kodak claims the estimated price point is in line with the average cost for Sun- and Unix-based applications and says the pricing might drop when the technology is ported to the personal computer platforms.)

Not for fun. The Kodak Portfolio authoring software/writable drive bundle is obviously not for the person who wants to send an interactive holiday greeting card on disc to a few friends and family. (Kodak is adamant, however, that its goal is to bring exactly those capabilities to the consumer market.)

For now, though, the Photo CD Portfolio publishing system is targeted toward Kodak’s commercial market — in particular, electronic publishing houses such as The Voyager Company, as well as in-house corporate audio-visual departments that create company-wide presentations or that generate large amounts of information to be distributed to remote offices.

Kodak claims that the cost savings for these types of organizations are immense. Considering the price tag of generating a business presentation at a slide service bureau — a minimum cost of $12 for a 35mm slide that’s of limited use — customers can quickly amortize the cost of purchasing its publishing system: 600 megabytes at $25 a disc.

Playback of Portfolio-format discs requires one of Kodak’s three Photo CD players, a Philips CD-I player that hooks to a television set, or a computer system with a Photo CD-capable CD-ROM drive, plus software to read and display Photo CD data. Hitachi might soon provide another viewing option. Although neither Kodak nor Hitachi would confirm it, it is rumored that Hitachi plans to produce a Photo CD player device this year.

Like dropping off a roll of film. For individuals who can’t justify the cost of bringing the Kodak production system in-house or don’t want to, Kodak says it is setting up photo finishers across the United States with the necessary equipment, so that people who want to press an interactive multimedia disc can drop off their original materials, and the finisher will build the Photo CD disc for them.

Georgia McCabe, director of Kodak’s worldwide commercial CD Imaging group, says photo finishers, service bureaus and in-house audio/visual divisions will be beta testing the commercial production system by mid-June. When the system is finalized, it is possible that publishing kiosks will be set up in these shops so that the customers can build their own discs, according to the company.

In the near future, Kodak says it will make its Photo CD Portfolio media, authoring software and APIs available at no charge to third-party software developers such as Macromedia or Aldus to encourage their use of the format within their presentation and authoring software.

This would allow commercial producers to create their “storyboards” in the program of their choice — if it supports the Kodak authoring description language — then save it on a computer disk as a Portfolio file format and bring it into a photo finisher, service bureau or for that matter into an in-house corporate production department for actual production of the discs.

Degree of difficulty. At this time Kodak does not plan to provide the technology necessary to write a Photo CD disc straight from one of these applications. The company says its decision is based on its belief that it would be expecting too much of these outside companies to build the necessary support for such a function into their applications.

“It’s not trivial to get data onto a CD-ROM disc,” says Paul McAfee, communications manager at Kodak. “When you write a CD-ROM disc, you need to manage a continuous flow of the data stream to the disc. And these third-party companies would have to build in all the functions needed to collect the data in an unfragmented data stream to the CD-ROM disc. [We believe] they don’t want to write the interface to the CD-ROM writer.”

KODAK TO GRANT LICENSES FOR MASS PRODUCTION OF PHOTO CDS

In the near future, the company also plans to develop a licensing program to allow the mass-replication of pre-recorded Photo CD discs, including the Photo CD Master, Pro Photo CD Master, Photo CD Catalog and the Photo CD Portfolio formats. Prior to this announcement, publishers who wanted to produce a Photo CD disc had to go to a photo finisher or service bureau that used one of Kodak’s Photo CD Imaging Workstation (PIW) systems.

Under the agreement, publishers using approved disc replicators and CD pressing houses will be allowed to mass-produce the contents of a Photo CD disc in the same way they mass produce audio CDs today. Kodak plans to charge the pressing house a “minimal” royalty per disc for the use of the Photo CD format and trademark logo. Kodak says it will negotiate separate royalty agreements for publishers who want to include Kodak software on their discs.

HOW ABOUT A NETWORKED CD-ROM WRITER?

In addition to the software and licensing developments, Kodak has announced an alliance with Meridian Data Systems to codevelop and co-distribute writable CD drives for use in a networked environment. According to Kodak, it is no different from a shared printer, except that instead of printing on paper, the device will print CD-ROM discs.

Initially the NetScribe 1000 system from Meridian and Kodak’s PCD LAN writer will be able to print ISO 9660 standard CD-ROM discs — for data and custom applications. According to Kodak, though, both these writers will support the writing of CD Portfolio discs when Kodak ships the Portfolio authoring software later this year.

Meridian is actually buying the writers from Kodak and “modifying them extensively,” according to a Kodak representative. Meridian plans to sell the device for about $13,995. Kodak in turn plans to buy a certain number of the writers back from Meridian and then sell them as Kodak drives.

According to both companies, they expect some overlap in the channel but believe they have primarily different markets. Kodak says the drive with its brand name will be priced similarly to the Meridian.

THE LONG VIEW: A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES

Kodak made several additional announcements in tandem with those mentioned above. The company is now shipping its InfoGuard-treated media that is supposed to be more durable and longer lasting than existing write-once or mass-produced CDs.

In conjunction with that announcement Kodak released information on its new writable CD publishing software for Windows, which will eventually be available on the Macintosh and Unix platforms. In addition Kodak is finally shipping the DOS version of its Photo CD Access software and the Kodak Photo CD Access developer toolkit, which will enable third-party software developers to build support for the Photo CD file formats into their applications.

According to Kodak, Aldus Fetch, Color Professional from ImageIn, Media Cybernetics’ Dr. Halo, Corel’s CorelDraw, Aldus PhotoStyler, Adobe Photoshop, EFI’s Cachet, Micrografx Picture Publisher and Photo Magic, and Mathematica’s Tempra Access can all read and display Photo CD images today. Each of these applications, if they don’t have support built in, provides the necessary software online or through software upgrades.

Kudos for Kodak. We applaud Kodak. For with each of these announcements, the company has proven that it has finally learned to work within the confines of the computer industry. But we encourage the company to not lose sight of its long-term goal: The real win for Kodak is the native adoption that McCabe has begun evangelizing.

Photo CD everywhere. If, for instance, Kodak were really to achieve through widespread licensing agreements the native adoption of Photo CD into cross-media devices, it would mean individuals could pop a Photo CD disc into many different types of devices that offer built-in support for Kodak’s technology, from a CD-ROM-based Macintosh or Multimedia PC to a 3DO Multiplayer to a Sony five-disc CD audio player, and be able to read and view the contents of that disc without having to purchase any Kodak software or hardware.

In addition, cross-platform applications could handle Photo CD formats as just another image type. And computer scanners could read the files from the desktop. Photo CD technology would be the de facto standard for handling digital images.

Janice Maloney