Interview with Dave Simpson of Mighty Atom Productions
2nd August 2000

While industry standard bearers rattled sabers and consumers scratched their heads in confusion, the DVD platform has finally evolved into a viable communication medium. Sales of DVD players passed the one-million mark and DVD-ROM drives now come standard on many computers. Poised confidently at the forefront of this change, Swansea-based Mighty Atom Productions offers a full range of media production facilities to allow emerging and established bands deliver audio CD and DVD enhanced with interactive media. Technical Director Dave Simpson talks about the challenges of planning, developing, authoring, and mastering media projects for clients ranging from Swansea City Council to local rock legends Powder.

His initial exposure to computers took place when Dave was working for Doctorate in Swansea University in Digital Audio. Dave said, "At Mighty Atom, we are striving to combine the best elements of technology with the best talents in graphic design and multimedia". Involved in both multimedia authoring and music production at Mighty Atom, Dave is trying to stretch the limits of CD-ROM and DVD based 'front loaded media' with on-demand internet technologies. "Our premise is that whilst in the future, perhaps all media will be streamed in real time from the web, we are many years from that being a viable proposition. The technology is certainly already there to acheive this, but the internet infrastructure most certainly isn't. It will be many years before every household in the country can download video at some 1Mbit/second simultaneously. Our belief is that there is still a lot of millage left yet in front loaded media such as CD and increasingly now DVD." However, Dave does see the Internet playing a large part of there technical strategy. "Where we do see the value of the Internet in particular is in providing updated and changing content to media such as CD and DVD. For example we can use the Internet to provide updated events and live dates news for fans through the user interface in the CD-ROM. This way the CD-ROM never goes out of date, there's always something new to look at."

Another area that seems to evolve through endless change are the tools and formats available to multimedia developers. "I have to say that at the moment Microsoft is really leading the way when it comes to multimedia encoding and production tools. "With the new Windows Media Player, you can literally embed any or all of a DVD-Video project anywhere in the Microsoft operating system. From a Web page to a PowerPoint slide to a Microsoft Word document." Within the DVD-Video specification, built-in support for interactivity provides some interesting options for developers. Is Mighty Atom planning to use this capability? "Absolutely. The development of interactive 'enhanced CDs' is seen only as the first step to releasing music on DVD along with a comprehensive interactive element. The possibilities are really endless and the scale of the storage avilable on DVD allows for content we can only dream of currently."

"I think that at this stage of multimedia authoring, the greatest advantage is to be innovative. If you're innovative now, you're going to stand out and a year from now, your products are going to be up to par with the latest stuff that is being done." Because this is such a new industry with evolving standards, authors and developers are often bedeviled with hardware and software issues. Is this situation improving? "It is some kind of maxim for developers -if you want to have new features, you're going to have new problems. But there is no possible way that you can innovate without creating issues."