TROUBLESHOOTONG GLOW ENGINES

By: Grant Tokumi
Information Advisor:  Robert Harrision 
-----------------------------

The document is an article for a radio control cars and truck web site.  
It assumes that the reader knows a little about the hobby, specifically,
about nitro glow engines.  The audience age varies greatly, probably from
around 13 to 40.  The document is designed so that the page can load in
a reasonable amount of time off the web.  Graphic sizes (both file size
and physical size) are small.  Quicktime and wav files are compressed
and are fairly short so file sizes can remain reasonable for
downloading at 14.4 or 28.8 baud modems.

HTML:  A web site was chosen for its ease in making the document
interactive.  General layout, including table was created with MS
Frontpage.  Then major line by line editing was done using MS Word 97 with
Nescape Navigator 3.0 as the test brwoser.  The form used was borrowed
from the ICS web server, however, the look of the form was modified to
better fit the purpose of the page.  

Photos:  Scanned in at 72 dpi into tif format.  72 dpi was chosen because
the image was going to remain in digitized form.  Tif format was chosen 
because it was a good cross-platform format and it was vector based so
image integrity remained intact when resizing.  The scanned image
was edited and resized in Photoshop 4.0, then outputed in jpg format with
medium quality (3 on the 10 point scale).  Jpg format was chosen over gif
format to take advantage of thousands of colors over the gif format's 256
colors.  Also background didn't have an image so gif transparency was not
necessary.  

Adobe Illustrator Beta was used to add the text in the photo in the table.
It was then exported as a tif file and resized in Photoshop 4.0 into the
final jpg graphic.  By using a vector based graphic program, stroking
the edges of the text was easy, the words could be resized easily, and the
edges could remain sharp (not blurry) after resizing. 

Quicktime:  Digitized using a Macintosh
            Software:  Adobe Premiere 4.2
            Compression:  Video, 50%
	    frame rate:  12 fps
            size 160X120

            Edited and remastered with:
            Software:  Adobe Premiere 4.2
            Compression:  Cinepak, 50%
	    frame rate:  12 fps
            Keyframes every 7 frames
            Millions of colors
            size 160X120

Mpg format was not an option because the video required audio, and mpg
audio resources were not available.  Quicktime was chosen over avi
because avi was not supported very well for macs, while quicktime format
was better supported on the PC side.  Also, web browsers like Netscape
Navigator have built in plugins to view quicktime movies.  A seperate
viewing program is not required.  

Cinepak compression was used because its is a good cross-platform
compression.  File size was also minimized by:
   Using small window size (160x120)
   Reducing quality of compression to 50%
   Using 12 fps which is fast enough so the video don't look jumpy.
   Keyframes every 7 frames
 
Wav file:   Kikaida - 01
            Digitized off CD using a Pentium 133 Processor
            Software: Adobe Premiere 4.2
            sample rate:  22kHz, 8 bit mono

	    Wav file was embedded with video clip and final quicktime
            sampled at 11 kHz, 8 bit mono

Wav file was chosen because the digitizing software saved the file as a
wav file, and web browsers like Netscape have plugins to play wav files. 
The audio file size was minimized by sampling at low rates.  Stereo was
not necessary in the video so mono was sufficient.  Most computer
speakers don't reproduce high and low frequencies very well so high
frequency and high sampling rate was not necessary.