ACSC 375 – Multimedia – 1 - Introduction

Lecturer: Dr. Stephania Loizidou Himona

Multimedia – Any combination of

·  Text

·  Graphic Art

·  Sound

·  Animation and

·  Video elements

“Multimedia excites eyes, ears, fingertips, and, most importantly the head”.

Virtual Reality (VR) – an extension of multimedia (= Interactive Multimedia).

Interactive Multimedia – When you allow an end user – the viewer of a MM project – to control what and when the elements are delivered.

Hypermedia – when you provide a structure of linked elements through which the user can navigate, interactive multimedia becomes hypermedia.

When to use – applications

Multimedia in

·  Business,

·  Schools,

·  Home,

·  Public Places

Input/Output Devices

Input Device: Keyboards, Mice, Trackballs, Joysticks, Touch screens, Magnetic Card, Encoders and Readers, Graphic Tablets, Scanners Optical Character Recognition Devices (barcode), Infrared Remotes, Voice recognition Systems, Digital Cameras

Output Hardware: Audio Devices, Monitors, Printers, Video Devices, Projectors

Communication Devices: Modems, Networks (LANs and WANs), Remote Application Sharing, Satellites.

Available Tools

Painting and Drawing Tools

CAD

Image Editing Tools

Rendering

Optical Character recognition (OCR) software

Sound Editing Programs

Animation, Video and Digital Movies

Compression

The Multimedia Team

- Project Manager

- Multimedia Designer (including information designers, graphic designers,

illustrations, animators image processing specialists, instructional designers

and interface designers)

- Writer (create character, actions and point of view)

- Video specialist

- Audio specialist

- Multimedia programmer

Although the definition is a simple one, making it work can be complicated! Not only do you need to understand how to make each multimedia element stand up and dance, but you also need to know how to use multimedia computer tools and technologies to work them together. The people who weave multimedia into meaningful tapestries are called multimedia developers.

Animations and digital video movies are sequences of bitmapped graphic scenes (frames), rapidly played back. But animations can also be made within the authoring system by rapidly changing the location of objects or sprites to generate the appearance of motion. (Most authoring tools adopt either a frame – or object-oriented approach to animate, but rarely both).

“We define multimedia as anything that requires more than two trips to the car”.

The software vehicle, the messages, and the content presented on a computer or television screen constitute a multimedia project. A multimedia project doesn’t have to be interactive to be called multimedia: users can sit back and watch it just as they do a movie or television. In such cases, a project is linear, starting at a beginning and running through to an end. When users are given navigational control to wander through the content at will, multimedia becomes nonlinear and interactive, and is a very powerful personal gateway to information.

Determining how a user will interact with and navigate through the content of a project requires great attention to the message you want conveyed, the scripting or storyboarding describing parameters of the project, the artwork, and the programming. You can also break an entire project with a badly designed interface. You can also break a project with inadequate or inaccurate content.

Multimedia elements are typically sewn together into a project using authoring tools. These software tools are designed to manage individual multimedia elements and provide user interaction. In addition, to providing a method for users to interact with the project, most authoring tools also offer facilities for creating and editing text and images, and they have extensions to drive videodisc players, videotape players and other relevant hardware peripherals. Sound and movies are usually created with editing tools dedicated to these media, and then the elements imported into the authoring system for playback. The sum of what gets played back and how it is presented to the viewer is the human interface. The interface is just as much the rules for what happens to the user’s input as it is the actual graphics on the screen. The hardware and software that govern the limits of what can happen are the multimedia platform or environment.

Multimedia requires large amount of digital memory when stored in an end user’s library, or large amounts of bandwidth when distributed over wires or glass fiver on a network.

CD-ROM (compact disc-read-only memory) is the most cost effective distribution medium for multimedia projects (72 minutes of excellent-quality full-screen video). It can contain unique mixes of images, sounds, text, video, and animation controlled by an authoring system to provide unlimited user interaction.

Selection of the proper platform for developing your multimedia project may be based on your personal preference of computer, your budget constraints, project delivery requirements, and the type of material and content of the project (Windows or Macintosh environment?).

i.e. Macintosh versus PC (since its inception, the Macintosh has been, by definition, a multimedia computer). However, hardware and software vendors are understandably attracted to the PC world because there have been many more PCs sold than Macintoshes. Conversion programs are also available!

Connections – example

At conferences where multimedia presentations are shown, the human speakers usually sit facing the audience, while the audience is treated to a view of the backside of the speaker’s computer. Among the many devices – computer, monitors, disk drives, video projectors, light valves, videodisc players, VCRs mixers, sound speakers, and power strips – there are enough wires and connections to resemble the intensive care ward of a hospital. Sometimes an attempt is made to drape these power and date hoses with a curtain.

The equipment required for developing your multimedia project depends on the content of the project as well as its design. You will certainly need as fast a computer as you can lay your hands on, with lost of RAM and disc storage space. If you can find content such as sound effects, music, graphic art, clip animation, and QuickTime of AV1 movies to use in your project, you may not need the extra tools for making your own. Typically, however, multimedia developers have separate equipment for digitizing sound from making digital still or movie images from videotape. Each device used for making or delivering multimedia must be “connected”.

* SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) – Macintosh (cabling)

* MCI (Media Control Interface) – Windows (connection)

Window multimedia architecture
MMSYSTEM.DLL
Low-level functions / Media Control
Interface (MCI)

Device Types Supported by Windows MCI

Device Type / Description
avi
cdaudio
dat
digitalvideo
mmovie
other
overlay
scanner
sequencer
vcr
videodisc
waveaudio / Audio Video Interleaved (Microsoft Video for Windows)
CD-Audio player (Red Book)
Digital audio tape player
Digital video in a window environment
Multimedia Movie Player (Macromedia Director)
Any undefined MCI device
Video overlay device
Image scanner
MIDI sequencer
Videotape recorder or player
Videodisc player
Waveform (digitized) audio device

Note: Applications with internal scripting languages such as Visual Basic and ToolBook can easily be programmed to send MCI commands to these devises.

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