Term 1 - L6 Multimedia Short Notes 2018

Multimedia
Definitions

 A combination of digitally manipulated text, photographs, graphic art, sound, animation, and
video elements.

Interactive Multimedia
 Known as the viewer of a multimedia project.
 To control what and when the elements are delivered.

Hypermedia
 A structure of linked elements through which the user can navigate, interactive multimedia.

Browser Application
 Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome, or Firefox.
 Browser are software programs or tools for viewing content on the Web.

Linear
 User can sit back and watch it just as they do a movie or the television.
 Starting at the beginning and running through to the end.

Nonlinear
 Users are given navigational control.
 Can wander through the content at will.
 User interactive, and is a powerful personal gateway to information.

Where to Use Multimedia

Multimedia in Business
 Include presentations, training, marketing, advertising, product demos, simulations,
databases, catalogs, instant messaging, and networked communications.
 Voice mail and video conferencing are provided on many LANs and WANs using distributed
networks and Internet protocols.

Multimedia in Schools
 Multimedia will provoke radical changes in the teaching process.
 The students, not teachers, become the core of the teaching and learning process.
 E-learning is a sensitive and highly politicized subject among educators.
 Educational software is often positioned as “enriching” the learning process, not as a
potential substitute for traditional teacher-based method.
 Student can repeat the same topic as many time they like.
 Save traveling costs and time.
 Student can learn at any time they like.

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Multimedia at Home
 Gardening, cooking, home design, remodeling, and repair to genealogy software (refer
textbook page 5).

Multimedia at Public Places

 In hotels, train stations, shopping malls, museums, libraries, banks, and grocery stores.
 Already available at stand-alone terminals or kiosks.

Virtual Reality (VR)

 The convergence of technology and creative invention in multimedia.
 Goggles, helmets, special gloves, and bizarre human interfaces attempt to place you “inside”
a lifelike experience.
 VR is an extension of multimedia.
 It uses the basic multimedia elements of imagery, sound, and animation.
 Requires instrumented feedback from a wired-up person.
 It is perhaps interactive multimedia at its fullest extension.

About Fonts and Faces (kindly refer textbook page 22 and 23)

Typeface
 It is a family of graphic characters that usually includes many type sizes and styles.

Font
 A collection of characters of a single size and style belonging to a particular typeface family.

Font Styles

 boldface, italic, underlining, and .

Type sizes
 Usually expressed in points.
o 1 point is 0.0138 inch, or about 1/72 of an inch.

Leading
 Line spacing.

Kerning
 The spacing between character pairs.

Tracking
 Spacing between two characters.

Pixels
 Picture elements.

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Cases
 Uppercase – CAPITAL LETTER.
 Lowercase – small letter.

Case sensitive
 Uppercase and lowercase letters must match exactly to be recognized.

Case Insensitive
 All computers recognize both the uppercase and lowercase forms of a character to be the
same.

Serif
 It is the little decoration at the end of a letter stroke.
 Times, New Century Schoolbook, Bookman, and Palatino.
 Used for body text because the serifs are said to help guide the reader’s eye along the line of
text.

San serif
 Used for headlines and bold statements.

Making Still Images

Still Images are generated by the computer in two ways:

Bitmap (or paint graphics)

 Also be called “raster” images.
 Bitmap editors are sometimes called “painting” programs.
 Used for photo-realistic images and for complex drawing requiring fine detail.
 File formats already use compression within the file itself:
 GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

Vector-drawn (or just plain “drawn”)

 Vector editors are sometimes called “drawing” programs.
 Used for lines, boxes, circles, polygons, and other graphic shapes that can be mathematically
expressed in angles, coordinates, and distances.

- The appearance of both types of images depends on the display resolution and capabilities of
your computer’s graphics hardware and monitor.
- Both types of images are stored in various file formats.
- Can be translated from one application to another or from one computer platform to another.

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Bitmaps
 A bit is the simplest element in the digital world, an electronic digit that is either on or off,
black or white, or true (1) of false (0).
 This is referred to as binary, since only two states (on or off) are available.
 A bitmap is a simple matrix of the tiny dots that form an image and are displayed on a
computer screen or printed.
 A one-dimensional matrix (1-bit depth) is used to display monochrome images.
 Where each bit is most commonly set to black or white.
 Pixels
 Can be either on or off, as in the 1-bit bitmap.
 By using more bits to describe them, can represent varying shades of color.
 4 bits for 16 colors; 8 bits for 256 colors; 15 bits for 32,768 colors;
16 bits for 65,536 colors; 24 bits for 16,772,216 colors.

Bitmap Sources
 From scratch with a paint or drawing program.
 Screen capture program or print screen.
 A photo or other artwork using a scanner.
 Can be copied, altered, e-mailed, and otherwise used in many creative ways like:
o Download from the Internet.

If you don’t want to make your own, you can get bitmaps from suppliers of clip art.

 A clip art collection may contain a random assortment of images, or it may contain a series
of graphics, photographs, sound, and video related to a single topic.

Once you have a bitmap, you can manipulate and adjust many of its properties such as,

 Brightness, contrast, color depth, hue, and size.

You can also cut and paste among many bitmaps using an image-editing program.

Bitmap Software
 Work the same on both Windows and Mac platforms.
 Macintosh computers do not ship with a painting tool, and Windows provides only a
rudimentary Paint program.
 Director
 Adobe’s Photoshop

Many designers also use a vector-based drawing program such as,

 Adobe’s Illustrator
 CorelDRAW
 InDesign

You can use your image editing software to create original images such as cartoons, symbols,
buttons, bitmapped text, and abstract images that have a refined “graphic” look, but it is virtually
impossible to create a realistic-looking photo from scratch using an image-editing program.

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Morphing (kindly refer textbook page 78)

 It is another effect that can be used to manipulate still images or to create interesting and
often bizarre animated transformations.

Vector Drawing
 Computer-aided design (CAD) programs
 Use vector-drawn object systems for creating the highly complex and geometric
renderings needed by architects and engineers.
 Graphic artists designing
 For print media use vector-drawn object because the same mathematics that put a
rectangle on your screen can also place that rectangle on paper without jaggies.
 Requires printer with higher resolution.
 Using a page description format such as Portable Document Format (PDF).
 Programs for 3-D animation

Vector-Drawn Objects vs. Bitmaps

Vector-Drawn Objects Bitmaps
- Made up by points, lines and shapes based - Made up by pixels with different colours.
on mathematical equations.
- File size are small. (Compressed) - File size are big.

- Web pages that use vector graphics - Take longer for the computer to process
download faster (file size advantage). and place on the screen.
- Easily scalable without loss of resolution. - Loss of image quality when enlarge or
- Because vector images are drawn from shrunk.
instructions on the fly, a rescaled image
retains the quality of the original.

- File format: .svg - File format: .jpeg, .png, .gif

3-D Drawing and Rendering

3-D Software
- NewTek’s Lightwave
- Autodesk’s Maya
- Google’s SketchUp
- Blender

3-D contains three dimensions, x (width), y (height) and depth (z dimension).

The depth of cubes and spheres must be calculated and displayed so that the perspective of the
rendered object seems correct to the eye.

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Scenes

 Consists of objects that in turn contain many small elements such as blocks, cylinders,
spheres, or cones.

Objects and elements in 3-D space carry with them properties such as shape, color, texture,
shading, and location.

Objects are created by modeling them using a 3-D application.

To model an object that you want to place into your scene, you must start with shape.

You can create a shape from scratch, or import a previously made shape from a library of geometric
shapes called primitives, typically blocks, cylinders, spheres, and cones.

Extrude

 When you extrude a plane surface, its shape extends some distance, either perpendicular to
the shape’s outline or along a defined path.

Lathe

 When you lathe a shape, a profile of the shape is rotated around a defined axis to create the
3-D object.

Flare

 Lights will create diffuse or shape shades and shadows on your objects and will also reflect,
or flare, where the light is most intense.

Steps:

Modeling Shading Rendering

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Computerized Color (kindly refer textbook page 91, 92 and 93)

Additive Color
 In this method, a color is created by combining colored light sources in three primary
colours: red, green, and blue (RGB).
 R + G + B = White
 R + G = Yellow
 R + B = Purple / Magenta
 G + B = Cyan
 This is the process used for cathode ray tube (CRT), liquid crystal (LCD), and plasma displays.

Subtractive Color
 In this method, color is created by combining colored media such as paints or ink that absorb
or subtract some parts of the color spectrum of light and reflect the other back to the eye.
 This is the process used to create color in printing.
 Three primary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY).
 Four-color printing includes black (which technically not a color but the absence of color).
 Four-color printing, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black is designated as CMYK.
 C+M+Y=K
 C + M = Blue
 C + Y = Green
 M + Y = Red

Color Palettes
 Palettes are mathematical tables that define the color of a pixel displayed on the screen.

Color Depth Colors Available File Format

1-bit Black and white (or any two colors)

4-bit 16 colors

8-bit 256 colors (good enough for color images) GIF files

16-bit 65,536 colors (excellent for color images)

24-bit 16,777,216 colors (totally photo-realistic) PNG format

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Image File Formats

 JPEG
 GIF
 PICT (Older format used on the Macintosh)
 device-independent bitmap (DIB), also known as BMP
 Common Windows palette-based image file format similar to PNG.
 PCX files
 Originally developed for use in Z-Soft MS-DOS paint packages.
 TIFF, or Tagged Interchange File Format
 PSD file for Photoshop
 AI file for Illustrator
 CDR file which created by Corel
 DXF was developed by AutoDesk as an ASCII-based drawing interchange file for AutoCAD.
 Also known as .dwg
 IGS or IGES, for Initial Graphics Exchange Standard

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Sound (kindly refer textbook page 105)

The Power of Sound

 When something vibrates in the air by moving back and forth, it creates waves of pressure.
 Sound waves vary in sound pressure level (amplitude) and in frequency or pitch.

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

 A decibel measurement is actually the ratio between a chosen reference a point on a
logarithmic scale and the level that is actually experienced.
 The higher the dB, the louder the sound. Sound also become sharp when the dB is
high.
 The lower the dB, the softer the sound.
 The perception of loudness is dependent upon the frequency or pitch of the sound.
 At low frequencies, more power is required to deliver the same perceived loudness
as for a sound at the middle or higher frequency ranges.

Digital Audio
 Is created when you represent the characteristics of a sound wave using number (or binary).
 A process referred to as digitizing.
 Sound can be digitized from a microphone, a synthesizer, existing recordings, live radio and
television broadcasts, and popular CD and DVDs.
 Digitized sound is sampled sound.
 A sample of sound is taken and stored as digital information in bits and bytes.
 Sampling rate or frequency, measured in kilohertz (kHz).
 The quality of this digital recording depends upon how often the samples are taken.
 The more often you take a sample and the more data you store about that sample, the finer
the resolution and quality of the captured sound when it is played back.
 Three sampling rates most often used in multimedia are:

11.025 kHz Telephone quality

22.05 kHz Radio FM quality

44.1 kHz CD-quality

Sample sizes are either 8 bits or 16 bits.

 The larger the sample size, the more accurately the data will describe the recorded sound.

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Making Digital Audio Files

 Plug a microphone into the microphone jack of your computer.

 Audio digitizing software: Audacity.
 Must focus on two crucial aspects:
 Higher quality usually means larger files, requiring longer download times on the
Internet and more storage space on a CD or DVD.
 Setting proper recording levels to get a good, clean recording.

Editing Digital Recordings

Trimming
 Removing black space from the front of a recording and any unnecessary extra time off the
end.

Splicing and Assembly

 Remove the extraneous noises that inevitably creep into a recording.
 Need to assemble longer recordings by cutting and pasting together many shorter ones.

Volume Adjustments
 To assemble ten different recordings into a single sound track, to have the same volume.
 Over increasing the volume may distort the file.
 It is best to use a sound editor to normalize the assembled audio file to a particular level.

Format Conversion
 Most sound editing software will save files in your choice of many formats, which can read
and imported by multimedia authoring systems.
 Data may be lost when converting formats.

Resampling or Downsampling
 Examine the existing digital recording and work through it to reduce the number of samples.
 May save considerable disk space.

Fade-ins and Fade-outs

 Helps to smooth out the very beginning and the very end of a sound file.

Equalization
 Offer digital equalization (EQ) capabilities that allow you to modify a recording’s frequency.
 To make sounds brighter or darker (higher or lower frequencies).

Time Stretching
 Alter (or adjust) the length in time of a sound file without changing its pitch.

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Digital Signal Processing (DSP)

 To process the signal with reverberation, multitap delay, chorus, flange, and other special
effects.
 To process a sound source with effects can greatly add to a project.
o It cannot be further edited.
o Must save the original file as a backup.

Reversing Sounds
 To reverse all or a portion of a digital audio recording.
 Can produce a surreal (or dreamlike), otherworldly effect when played backward.

Multiple Tracks
 To edit and combine multiple tracks.
 Then, merge the tracks and export them in a “final mix” to a single audio file.

File Size vs. Quality

- The sampling rate determines the frequency at which samples will be taken for the
recording.
- The higher the sound quality, the larger the file size.

Stereo recordings Monophonic recordings

- More lifelike and realistic. - Fine but tend to sound a bit
- Two microphones (left and right) is uninteresting when compared with
needed to record stereo. stereo recordings.
- File size are big. - File size are small.
- Formulas: - Formulas:
sampling rate in Hz * duration in sec. sampling rate in Hz * duration in sec.
* (bit resolution/8) [in byte] * 2 * (bit resolution/8) [in byte] * 1

MIDI Audio

- Stand for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

- Provides a protocol for passing detailed descriptions of a musical score, such as the notes,
the sequences of notes, and the instrument that will play these notes.
- MIDI data is not digitized sound.
 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.
- To make MIDI scores, you need notation software, sequencer software, and a sound
synthesizer.
- A MIDI keyboard is also useful for simplifying the creation of musical scores.

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MIDI vs. Digital Audio

Advantages of using MIDI Disadvantages of using MIDI
- MIDI file is completely independent of - MIDI data does not represent sound
playback quality. but musical instruments.
- MIDI files are small and don’t take up - Playback will be accurate only it the
as much memory, disk space, or MIDI playback device is identical to the
bandwidth. device used for production.
- MIDI files embedded in web pages’ - MIDI cannot easily be used to play back
load and play more quickly. spoken dialog.
- The length of a MIDI file can be
changed without changing the pitch of
the music or degrading the audio
quality.
- Represent the pitch and length of
notes.

Use MIDI in the following circumstances:

 Don’t have enough memory or bandwidth to work a digital audio.

 Have a high-quality MIDI sound source.
 Complete control over the machines on which your program will be delivered.
 Don’t need spoken dialog.

Reasons to work with digital audio:

Digital Audio MIDI

- A wider selection of application - Require a modicum of familiarity with
software. musical scores, keyboards, and
- Available for both the Macintosh and notation, as well as audio production.
Windows platforms.
- Do not demand knowledge of music
theory.

Effects: (kindly refer textbook page 141)

- Curtain - Swap
- Direct - Swing In
- Doors - Swing Out
- Inset - Wipe
- Page Turn - Zoom
- Push
- Slide
- Spin
- Split
- Stretch

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Principles of Animation
 Animation is possible because of a biological phenomenon known as persistence of vision
and a psychological phenomenon called phi.
 This makes it possible for a series of images that are changed very slightly and very rapidly,
one after the other, to seemingly blend together into a visual illusion of movement.
 Digital television video builds 24, 30, or 60 entire frames or pictures every second.

Animation by Computer

2-D animations
 Simple and static, not changing their position on the screen.
 Path animation
 Path animation in 2-D space increases the complexity (or difficulty) of an animation
and provides motion, changing the location of an image along a predetermined path
(position) during a specified amount of time (speed).
 Example of software that provide user-friendly tools:
 Flash
 Power Point

3-D animations
 Calculated along all three axes (x, y, and z), allowing an image or object that itself is created
with a front, back, sides, top, and bottom.
 3-D animation programs:
 NewTek’s Lightwave
 AutoDesk’s Maya
 Commercial films such as Shrek, Coraline, Toy Story, and Avatar.

Animation Techniques

Cel Animation
 Made famous by Disney use a series of progressively different graphics or cels on each frame
of movie film which plays 20 fps.
 The term cel derives from the clear celluloid sheets that were used for drawing each frame,
which have been replaced today by layers of digital imagery.

Tweening
 It is an action that requires calculating the number of frames between keyframes and the
path the action takes.
 Then, actually sketching the series of progressively different outlines with pencil.
 The pencilled frames are assembled and then actually filmed as a pencil test to check
smoothness, continuity, and timing.

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Computer Animation

Kinematics
 Kinematics is the study of the movement and motion of structures that have joints, such as
a walking man.
 Animating a walking step will need to calculate the position, rotation, velocity, and
acceleration of all the joints and articulated parts involved as shown as below: -
 Knees bend, hips flex, shoulders swing, and the head bobs.

Inverse kinematics
 Available in high-end 3-D programs such as Lightwave and Maya.
 It is the process by which you link objects such as hands to arms and define their
relationships and limits.
 For example, elbows cannot bend backward.

Morphing
 Morphing is a popular effect in which one image transforms into another.

Animation File Formats

 Director - .dir and .dcr
 Animator Pro - .fli and .flc
 3D Studio Max - .max
 GIF89a - .gif
 Flash - .fla and .swf

In some cases, especially with 3-D animations, the individual rendered frames of an animation are
put together into one of the standard digital video file containers, such as:

 Windows Audio Video Interleaved format - .avi

 QuickTime - .qt and .mov
 Motion Picture Experts Group video - .mpeg and .mpg

New with HTML5 is animation built within a .svg (scalable vector graphics) file, where graphic
elements can be programmed to change over time.

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Video

- An excellent method for delivering multimedia to an audience raised on television.

- You can effectively present your messages and reinforce your story, and viewers tend to
retain more of what they see.

How Video Works and Is Displayed

 When light reflected from an object passes through a video camera lens, that light is
converted into an electronic signal by a special sensor called a charge-coupled device (CCD).

Differences between Analog video and Digital video: -

Analog Video Digital Video

- Have a resolution measured in the - Digital video signals consist of a
number of horizontal scan lines. discrete color and brightness (RGB)
- Each of those lines represents value for each pixel.
continuous measurements of the color
and brightness along the horizontal
axis.
- In a linear signal that is analogous to an
audio signal.

Digitizing analog video involves reading the analog signal and breaking it into separate data
packets.

This process is similar to digitizing audio, except that with video the vertical resolution is limited to
the number of horizontal scan lines.

Analog Video
File formats: -

NTSC

 Stands for National Television Standards Committee.

 It is a system for broadcasting and displaying video used by United States, Canada, Mexico,
Japan, Malaysia, and many other countries.
 A single frame of video was made up of 525 horizontal scan lines (NTSC standard).
 Each of these passes (which happen at a rate of 60 per second, or 60 Hz) painted a field, and
the two fields were then combined to create a single frame at a rate of 30 fps.

PAL

 Stands for Phase Alternate Line.

 This system was used in the United Kingdom, Western Europe, Australia, South Africa, China
and South America.
 Increased the screen resolution to 625 horizontal lines.
 Slowed the scan rate to 25 fps.

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SECAM

 Stands for Sequential Color and Memory.

 This system was used in France, Eastern Europe, the former USSR, and a few other countries.
 It is a 625-line, 50 Hz system.
 It differed greatly from both the NTSC and the PAL color systems in its basic technology and
broadcast method.

Overscan and the Safe Title Area

 Overscan is an image larger than will fit on a standard TV screen so that the “edge” of the
image seen by a viewer is always bounded.
 Underscan is a smaller image displayed by computer monitors on the monitor’s picture
tube.

Digital Video Containers

 A digital video architecture is made up of an algorithm for compressing and encoding video
and audio, a container in which to put the compressed data, and a player that can recognize
and play back those files.
 Common containers for video are: -
 Ogg - .ogg (Theora for video, Vorbis for audio)
 Flash Video - .flv
 MPEG - .mp4
 QuickTime - .mov
 Windows Media Format - .wmv
 WebM - .webm
 RealMedia - .rm
 Containers may include data compressed by a choice of codecs, and media players may
recognize and play back more than one video file container format.

Codec
 Stands for codec and decode which use at data compression or zip.
 A codec is the algorithm used to compress a video for delivery and then decode it in real
time for fast playback.

MPEG

 Stands for Moving Picture Experts Group.

 MPEG-1
 You could deliver 1.2 Mbps of video and 250 Kbps of two-channel stereo using
CD-ROM technology.
 MPEG-2
 Required higher data rates (3 to 15 Mbps).
 Delivered higher image resolution, improved picture quality, interlaced video
formats, multiresolution scalability, and multichannel audio features.
 The video compression standard required for DTV and for making DVDs.
 MPEG-4
 Provides a content-based method for assimilating multimedia elements.

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