Multimedia Notes

UNIT IV - MULTIMEDIA

Multimedia is any combination of text, art, sound, animation, and video delivered to you by computer or other electronic or digitally manipulated means.

When you weave together the sensual elements of multimedia—dazzling pictures and animations, engaging sounds, compelling video clips, and raw textual information— you can electrify the thought and action centers of people’s minds.

Uses:

Multimedia is appropriate whenever a human user is connected to electronic information of any kind, at the “human interface.”

Multimedia in Business

Business applications for multimedia include presentations, training, marketing, advertising, product demos, simulations, databases, catalogs, instant messaging, and networked communications.

Voice mail and video conferencing are provided on many local and wide area networks (LANs and WANs) using distributed networks and Internet protocols.

            Most presentation software packages let you make pretty text and add audio and video clips to the usual slide show of graphics and text material.

Multimedia is enjoying widespread use in training programs. Flight attendants learn to manage international terrorism and security through simulation.

Mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) utilizing Bluetooth and Wi-Fi communications technology make communication and the pursuit of business more efficient.

Multimedia in Schools

Schools are perhaps the destination most in need of multimedia. Many schools in the United States today are chronically underfunded and occasionally slow to adopt new technologies, and it is here that the power of multimedia can be maximized for the greatest long-term benefit to all.

The U.S. government has challenged the telecommunications industry to connect every classroom, library, clinic, and hospital in America to the information superhighway.

            E-learning is a sensitive and highly politicized subject among educators, so educational software is often positioned as “enriching” the learning process, not as a potential substitute for traditional teacher-based methods.

            Students can put together interactive magazines and newsletters, make original art using image-manipulation software tools, and interview students, townspeople, coaches, and teachers.

ITV (Interactive TV) is widely used among campuses to join students from different locations into one class with one teacher.

Multimedia at Home

From gardening, cooking, home design, remodeling, and repair to genealogy software multimedia has entered the home.

Eventually, most multimedia projects will reach the home via television sets or monitors with built-in interactive user inputs—either on old-fashioned color TVs or on new high-definition sets.

Today, home consumers of multimedia own either a computer with an attached CD-ROM or DVD drive or a set-top player that hooks up to the television, such as a Nintendo Wii, X-box, or Sony PlayStation machine.

Multimedia in Public Places

In hotels, train stations, shopping malls, museums, libraries, and grocery stores, multimedia is already available at stand-alone terminals or kiosks, providing information and help for customers

Hotel kiosks list nearby restaurants, maps of the city, airline schedules, and provide guest services such as automated checkout. Printers are often attached so that users can walk away with a printed copy of the information.

Museum kiosks are not only used to guide patrons through the exhibits, but when installed at each exhibit, provide great added depth, allowing visitors to browse through richly detailed information specific to that display.

Virtual Reality

At the convergence of technology and creative invention in multimedia is virtual reality.

Goggles, helmets, special gloves, and bizarre human interfaces attempt to place you “inside” a lifelike experience.

Take a step forward, and the view gets closer; turn your head, and the view rotates. Reach out and grab an object; your hand moves in front of you.

Maybe the object explodes in a 90-decibel crescendo as you wrap your fingers around it. Or it slips out from your grip, falls to the floor, and hurriedly escapes through a mouse hole at the bottom of the wall.

VR requires terrific computing horsepower to be realistic. In VR, your cyberspace is made up of many thousands of geometric objects plotted in three-dimensional space: the more objects and the more points that describe the objects, the higher the resolution and the more realistic your view.

As you move about, each motion or action requires the computer to recalculate the position, angle, size, and shape of all the objects that make up your view, and many thousands of computations must occur as fast as 30 times per second to seem smooth.

The Stages of a Multimedia Project- Making Multimedia

Most multimedia and web projects must be undertaken in stages. Some stages should be completed before other stages begin, and some stages may be skipped or combined. Here are the four basic stages in a multimedia project:

Planning and costing

A project always begins with an idea or a need that you then refine by outlining its messages and objectives.

Identify how you will make each message and objective work within your authoring system. Before you begin developing, plan out the writing skills, graphic art, music, video, and other multimedia expertise that you will require.

Develop a creative “look and feel” as well as a structure and a navigational system that will allow the viewer to visit the messages and content. Estimate the time you’ll need to do all the elements, and then prepare a budget.

Work up a short prototype or proof-of-concept, a simple, working example to demonstrate whether or not your idea is feasible.

This often results in false starts and wasted time and, in the long run, higher development cost. The more time you spend getting a handle on your project by defining its content and structure in the beginning, the faster you can later build it, and the less reworking and rearranging will be required midstream.

Designing and producing

Perform each of the planned tasks to create a finished product. During this stage, there may be many feedback cycles with a client until the client is happy.

Testing

Test your programs to make sure that they meet the objectives of your project, work properly on the intended delivery platforms, and meet the needs of your client or end user.

Delivering

Package and deliver the project to the end user. Be prepared to follow up over time with tweaks, repairs, and upgrades.

The MULTIMEDIA SKILL set, may be available in a single individual or, more likely, in a composite of individuals working as a team.

A multimedia production team may require as many as 18 discrete roles, including 

Project Manager

A project manager’s role is at the center of the action. He or she is responsible for the overall development and implementation of a project as well as for day-to-day operations.

Budgets, schedules, creative sessions, time sheets, illness, invoices, and team dynamics—the project manager is the glue that holds it together.

            The project manager has two major areas of responsibility: design and management.

The management side consists of scheduling and assigning tasks, running meetings, and managing milestones—essentially overseeing all aspects of product development from beginning

to end.

Another important team member was the product manager—a marketing person who is responsible for representing the product to the outside world.

A good project manager must completely understand the strengths and limitations of hardware and software so that he or she can make good decisions about what to do and what not to do.

Multimedia Designer

The look and feel of a multimedia project should be pleasing and aesthetic, as well as inviting and engaging. Screens should present an appealing mix of color, shape, and type.

Graphic designers, illustrators, animators, and image processing specialists deal with the visuals.

Instructional designers are specialists in education or training and make sure that the subject matter is clear and properly presented for the intended audience.

Interface designers devise the navigation pathways and content maps.

Information designers structure content, determine user pathways and feedback, and select presentation media based on an awareness of the strengths of the many separate media that make up multimedia.

The multimedia designer (sometimes called an information designer) prepares the blueprint for the entire project: content, media, and interaction.

Multimedia designers need a variety of skills. You need to be able to analyze content structurally and match it up with effective presentation methods.

Interface Designer

Like a good film editor, an interface designer’s best work is never seen by the viewer—it’s “transparent.”

In its simplest form, an interface provides control to the people who use it.

It also provides access to the “media” part of multimedia, meaning the text, graphics, animation, audio, and video—without calling attention to itself.

The elegant simplicity of a multimedia title screen, the ease with which a user can move about within a project, effective use of windows, backgrounds, icons, and control panels—these are the result of an interface designer’s work

Writer

Multimedia writers do everything writers of linear media do, and more.

They create character, action, and point of view—a traditional scriptwriter’s tools of the trade—and they also create interactivity.

They write proposals, they script voice-overs and actors’ narrations, they write text screens to deliver messages, and they develop characters designed for an interactive environment.

Scriptwriters write dialog, narration, and voice-overs. Both often get involved in overall design

Video Specialist

video specialist to be responsible for an entire team of videographers, sound technicians, lighting designers, set designers, script supervisors, gaffers, grips, production assistants, and actors.

Whether working individually or managing a large crew, a video specialist needs to understand how to shoot quality video, how to transfer the video footage to a computer, how to edit the footage down to the final product using a digital nonlinear editing system (NLE), and how to prepare the completed video files for the most efficient delivery on DVD or the Web.

Audio Specialist

The quality of audio elements can make or break a multimedia project.

Audio specialists are the wizards who make a multimedia program come alive, by designing and producing music, voice-over narrations, and sound effects

Audio specialists may be responsible for locating and selecting suitable music and talent, scheduling recording sessions, and digitizing and editing recorded material into computer files

Multimedia Programmer

A multimedia programmer or software engineer integrates all the multimedia elements of a project into a seamless whole using an authoring system or programming language

Creative multimedia programmers can coax extra performance from multimedia-authoring and programming systems.

Without programming talent, there can be no multimedia.

Code, whether written in JavaScript, OpenScript, Lingo, RevTalk, PHP, Java, or C++, is the sheet music played by a well-orchestrated multimedia project.

Producer of Multimedia for the Web

Web site producer is a new occupation, but putting together a coordinated set of pages for the World Wide Web requires the same creative process, skill sets, and (often) teamwork as any kind of multimedia does.

A web site should never be finished, but should remain dynamic, fluid, and alive.

Using Text in Multimedia

Imagine designing a project that used no text at all. Its content could not be at all complex, and you would need to use many pictures and symbols to train your audience how to navigate through the project.

Use text for titles and headlines (what it’s all about), for menus (where to go), for navigation (how to get there), and for content (what you see when you get there).

Use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), preferred over the deprecated HTML <font> tag, allows you to be quite precise about font faces, sizes, and other attributes

Animating Text

There are plenty of ways to retain a viewer’s attention when displaying text. For example, you can animate bulleted text and have it “fly” onto the screen.

Hypermedia and Hypertext

Interactive multimedia becomes hypermedia when its designer provides a structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate and interact.

When words are keyed or indexed to other words, you have a hypertext system; the “text” part of this term represents the project’s content and meaning, rather than the graphical presentation of the text.

Hypertext is what the World Wide Web is all about.

Text is stored in a computer instead of on printed pages; the computer’s powerful processing capabilities can be applied to make the text more accessible and meaningful.

The text can then be called hyper-text; because the words, sections, and thoughts are linked, the user can navigate through text in a nonlinear way, quickly and intuitively.

Links are the navigation pathways and menus; nodes are accessible topics, documents, messages, and content elements. A link anchor is where you come from; a link end is the destination node linked to the anchor.

Hypertext systems are currently used for electronic publishing and reference works, technical documentation, educational courseware, interactive kiosks, electronic catalogs, interactive fiction, and text and image databases.

Sound

            Sound is perhaps the most sensuous element of multimedia.

It is meaningful “speech” in any language, from a whisper to a scream.

It can provide the listening pleasure of music, the startling accent of special effects, or the ambience of a mood-setting background.

            Sound pressure levels (loudness or volume) are measured in decibels (dB).

Experiments by researchers in residential areas have shown that a sound generator at 45dB produces no reaction from neighbors; at 45 to 55 dB, sporadic complaints; at 50 to 60 dB, widespread complaints;

Digital audio

Digital audio is created when you represent the characteristics of a sound wave using numbers—a process referred to as digitizing.

We can digitize sound from a microphone, a synthesizer, existing recordings, live radio and television broadcasts, and popular CD and DVDs.

Digitized sound is sampled sound. Every nth fraction of a second, a sample of sound is taken and stored as digital information in bits and bytes.

The quality of this digital recording depends upon how often the samples are taken (sampling rate or frequency, measured in kilohertz, or thousands of samples per second)

The three sampling rates most often used in multimedia are 44.1 kHz (CD-quality), 22.05 kHz, and 11.025 kHz. Sample sizes are either 8 bits or 16 bits.

Making Digital Audio Files

Making digital audio files is fairly straightforward on most computers.

Plug a microphone into the microphone jack of your computer. If you want to digitize archived analog source materials—music or sound effects that you have saved on videotape

Trimming

Removing “dead air” or blank space from the front of a recording and any unnecessary extra time off the end is your first sound editing task.

Trimming is typically accomplished by dragging the mouse cursor over a graphic representation of your recording and choosing a menu command such as Cut, Clear, Erase, or Silence.

Splicing and Assembly

Using the same tools mentioned for trimming, we will probably want to remove the extraneous noises that inevitably creep into a recording.

Volume Adjustments

If you are trying to assemble ten different recordings into a single sound track, there is little chance that all the segments will have the same volume.

Format Conversion

In some cases, your digital audio editing software might read a format different from that read by your presentation or authoring program.

Most sound editing software will save files in your choice of many formats.

Resampling or Downsampling

If you have recorded and edited your sounds at 16-bit sampling rates but are using lower rates and resolutions in your project, you must resample or downsample the file.

Fade-ins and Fade-outs

Most programs offer enveloping capability, useful for long sections that you wish to fade in or fade out gradually.

Equalization

Some programs offer digital equalization (EQ) capabilities that allow you to modify a recording’s frequency content so that it sounds brighter (more high frequencies) or darker (low, ominous rumbles).

Time Stretching

Advanced programs let you alter the length (in time) of a sound file without changing its pitch.

MIDI Audio

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a communications for electronic musical instruments and computers.

Digital audio is a recording, MIDI is a score—the first depends on the capabilities of your sound system, the other on the quality of your musical instruments and the capabilities of your sound system.

A MIDI file is a list of time-stamped commands that are recordings of musical actions

Composing your own original score can be one of the most creative and rewarding aspects of building a multimedia project, and MIDI is the quickest, easiest, and most flexible tool for this task.

The process of creating MIDI music is quite different from digitizing existing recorded audio.

To make MIDI scores, however, you will need notation software, sequencer software, and a sound synthesizer.

A MIDI keyboard is also useful for simplifying the creation of musical scores.

MIDI software creates data about each note as it is played on a MIDI keyboard which note it is, how much pressure was used on the keyboard to play the note, how long it was sustained, and how long it takes for the note to decay or fade away.

An advantage of structured data such as MIDI is the ease with which you can edit the data.

Instruments that you can synthesize are identified by a General MIDI numbering system that ranges from 0 to 127

A MIDI file originally composed with, say, piano, electric guitar, and bass, might be played back with piccolo, tambourine, and glockenspiel if the ID numbers were not precisely mapped to match the original hardware setup.

MIDI vs DIGITAL AUDIO:

MIDI data and digital audio are like vector and bitmapped graphics:

MIDI data is device dependent; digital audio is not

MIDI files are much smaller than digitized audio.

MIDI files sound better than digital audio files when played on high-quality MIDI device

MIDI VS DIGITAL AUDIO

Comparison	MIDI	Digitized Audio
Representation	Shorthand representation of music stored in numeric form	Sampling is done to convert the data into digital form
Device Independence File Size	Device dependent 200   to 1000 times smaller than Digitized Audio	Device  Independent Larger File Size
Memory Requirement	Less storage space	Large Storage space
Edit Options	Easily editable and all the information retainable	Difficult to edit.
Quality	Better when played on high quality MIDI device	Not so better
Playback	Does not have consistent playback quality	Consistent playback quality
Analogy	Vector Graphics	Bitmap Image
Ease to incorporate	Must have knowledge	Does not require much knowledge

AUDIO FILE FORMAT

When you create multimedia, it is likely that you will deal with file formatsand translators for text, sounds, images, animations, or digital video clips.

A sound file’s format is simply a recognized methodology for organizing and (usually) compressing the digitized sound’s data bits and bytes into a data file.

An audio CD provides up to 80 minutes of playing time.

LPCM tracks from an audio CD are usually converted and stored on a computer in uncompressed AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) or wave format (WAV) files when copied from the CD.

There are huge numbers of sound file formats and “multimedia containers” that store sound data

(more than three hundred different file name extensions are used for sound files),

            The MP3 format was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and evolved during the 1990s into the most common method for storing consumer audio.

WMA (Windows Media Audio) is a proprietary Microsoft format developed to improve MP3.

MP4 is a format based on Apple’s QuickTime movie (.mov) “container” model and is similar to the MOV format, which stores various types of media, particularly time-based streams such as audio and video.

M4p files contain only audio, but are encrypted for Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format, which is part of the MP4 model, was adopted by Apple’s iTunes store, and many music files are commercially available in this format.

ACC is the default format for iPod, iPhone, PlayStation, Wii, Dsi, and many mobile phones including Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Samsung, Siemens, and Sony Ericsson.

The SWF format is a container for vector-based graphics and animations, text, video, and sound delivered over the Internet.

A codec (compressor-decompressor) is software that compresses a stream of audio or video data for storage or transmission, and then decompresses it for playback.