Chapter 1 Introduction to Multimedia Mr. Nael A. Aburas

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Chapter 1Introduction to Multimedia

• Mr. Nael A. Aburas

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Outline

• What is Multimedia?
• Where to use multimedia?
• Multimedia and Hypermedia
• World Wide Web
• Overview of Multimedia Software Tools

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1.1 What is Multimedia?

• When different people mention the term
  multimedia, they often have quite different, or
  even opposing, viewpoints.
• A PC vendor a PC that has sound capability, a
  DVD-ROM drive, and perhaps the superiority of
  multimedia-enabled microprocessors that
  understand additional multimedia instructions.
• A consumer entertainment vendor interactive
  cable TV with hundreds of digital channels
  available, or a cable TV-like service delivered
  over a high-speed Internet connection.
• A Computer Science (CS) student applications
  that use multiple modalities, including text,
  images, drawings (graphics), animation, video,
  sound including speech, and interactivity.
• Multimedia and Computer Science
• Graphics, HCI, visualization, data compression,
  graph theory, networking, database systems.
  Multimedia and Hypermedia, all of these have
  important contributions to make in multimedia at
  the present time.

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1.1 What is Multimedia?

• Multimedia is everything you can hear or see
  texts, books, pictures, music, sounds, CDs,
  videos, DVDs, Records, Films, and more.
• Multimedia is the design, implementation,
  manipulation, storing, and proper delivery of
  various types of media to interested users
• Multimedia is divided into three major types
  interactive multimedia where users control the
  delivery of the integrated elements, hypermedia
  where users are presented with navigational
  capabilities, and liner multimedia such as TV or
  radio where users have no control over the flow
  of information and have no interaction.

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Components of Multimedia

• Multimedia involves multiple modalities of text,
  audio, images, drawings, animation, and video.
• Examples of how these modalities are put to use
• Video conferencing.
• Distributed lectures for higher education.
• Co-operative work environments, that allow
  business people to edit a shared document, or
  school children to share a single game.
• Searching in (very) large video and image
  databases for target visual objects.
• Augmented reality placing real-appearing
  computer graphics and video objects into scenes.

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Components of Multimedia

• Making multimedia components editable, allow the
  user side to decide what components, video,
  graphics, etc., are actually viewed allow the
  client to move components around or delete them.
• Using voice-recognition to build an interactive
  environment, say a kitchen-wall web browser.

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Where to use multimedia?

• Education
• Broadcasting Entertainment
• Research Development
• Health

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Education

• Computer Aided Learning
• To assist student through simulation for better
  understanding.
• Virtual Campus
• Learning takes place in a virtual classroom
  using video conferencing and online lecture so
  that students all around the world can attend
• Instructor support.
• Resource materials for instructors.

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Broadcasting Entertainment

• Electronic catalogue
• Product features and descriptions are advertises
  through web, CD and mobile devices.
• On-demand News or movies
• News, Movies and TV series can be watched on
  demand through web and mobile devices

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Broadcasting Entertainment

• 3D or animation movies
• Movies created through advance 3D technology
  and animation techniques.
• Video Games
• Advances in the field of multimedia have led
  to more attractive video and computer games being
  available now in the consumer market.

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Broadcasting Entertainment

• Virtual Reality
• Virtual Reality refers to the use of a computer
  to immerse the user into a simulated experience
  that it seems real. Virtual Reality systems often
  use special hardware to enhance the experience,
  including visual displays.

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Benefits of using multimedia in software

• Ease of use
• User friendly, increase users effectiveness.
• Intuitive Interface
• Allows user to determine functions of an
  application by their own intuition.
• Immersive Experience
• Software application takes over the
• entire computer screen, allows user to
• focus on application.

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Benefits of using multimedia in software

• Better understanding
• Simultaneous presentation of different media
  provides richer broader range of information.
• Cost effectiveness
• Less training, less technical support.

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Evaluating Multimedia Products

• Evaluation can be done from two perspectives

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Users perspective

• Subject /content
• Area of interest
• Entertainment value multimedia game and sports
  related products
• Education, training or learning objectives

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Users perspective

• Platform (Hardware and Software)
• Focus on what type of equipment the user has, and
  if it is compatible with a specific product.
• Criteria for evaluation
• Hardware platforms
• Computer processor speed and data bus
  requirements
• Memory sizing

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Users perspective

• Usability
• Usability means that user can apply, learn, use
  the program efficiently.
• The key criteria here are
• Learning/training time how long dose it take to
  learn how to use the product.
• Error rate how often mistakes made by the users
  and how severe is the mistake?
• Task Time how long does it take to accomplish a
  task
• Retention how difficult is for the user to
  operate and how attractive is the product to use

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Users perspective

• Cost
• The cost can be the first or the last factor
  considered by many people. Generally, users are
  willing to spend depending on how much is gained.

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Developers Perspective

• Developer must evaluate and aim to improve their
  product better than the last.
• From the developers perspective, evaluation will
  cover
• Content
• Performance
• Delivery
• interface

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Developers Perspective

• Content
• Product domain or subject matter-is the material
  useful for the user.
• Message How does the product communicate the
  information? Will the users understand it?
• Comparison to comparable products

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Developers Perspective

• Performance
• Developer must consider that general users have
  equipment that has much less capabilities, so
  products should always be tested on a range of
  platforms before they are released.
• Graphics, audio and video presentation should be
  use wisely not to slow down the application for
  slower machine

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Developers Perspective

• Delivery
• Delivery means how fast user is able to use the
  product depending on the speed of the
  installation procedure, the configuration and
  documentation.
• The instructions should be straightforward, easy
  to configure and documentation are through and
  adequate.

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Developers Perspective

• Interface
• Ease-of-use for novice users
• Depth for experience or expert users
• Navigation features all work and are all useful
  and user-friendly

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Multimedia Research Topics and Projects

• To the computer science researcher, multimedia
  consists of a wide variety of topics
• Multimedia processing and coding multimedia
  content analysis, content-based multimedia
  retrieval, multimedia security, audio/image/video
  processing, compression, etc.
• Multimedia system support and networking
  network protocols, Internet, operating systems,
  servers and clients, quality of service (QoS),
  and databases.
• Multimedia tools, end-systems and applications
  hypermedia systems, user interfaces, authoring
  systems.

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Current Multimedia Projects

• Many exciting research projects are currently
  underway. Here are a few of them
• Camera-based object tracking technology tracking
  of the control objects provides user control of
  the process.
• Multiple views allowing photo-realistic
  (video-quality) synthesis of virtual actors from
  several cameras or from a single camera under
  differing lighting.
• Digital fashion aims to develop smart clothing
  that can communicate with other such enhanced
  clothing using wireless communication.

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Current Multimedia Projects

• Electronic Housecall system an initiative for
  providing interactive health monitoring services
  to patients in their homes
• Augmented Interaction applications used to
  develop interfaces between real and virtual
  humans for tasks such as augmented storytelling.

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1.2 Multimedia and Hypermedia

• History of Multimedia
• Newspaper perhaps the first mass communication
  medium, uses text, graphics, and images.
• Motion pictures conceived of in 1830s in order
  to observe motion too rapid for perception by the
  human eye.
• Wireless radio transmission Guglielmo Marconi,
  at Pontecchio, Italy, in 1895.
• Television the new medium for the 20th century,
  established video as a commonly available medium
  and has since changed the world of mass
  communications.

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1.2 Multimedia and Hypermedia

• The connection between computers and ideas about
  multimedia covers what is actually only a short
  period
• 1969 Nelson and van Dam at Brown University
  created an early hypertext editor called FRESS.
• 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide
  Web
• 1991 MPEG-1 was approved as an international
  standard for digital video led to the newer
  standards, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and further MPEGs in
  the 1990s.
• 1991 The introduction of PDAs in 1991 began a
  new period in the use of computers in multimedia.
• 1992 JPEG was accepted as the international
  standard for digital image compression led to
  the new JPEG2000 standard

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1.2 Multimedia and Hypermedia

• 1994 Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen created the
  Netscape program.
• 1995 The JAVA language was created for
  platform-independent application development.
• 1996 DVD video was introduced high quality
  full-length movies were distributed on a single
  disk.
• 1998 XML 1.0 was announced as a W3C
  Recommendation.
• 1998 Hand-held MP3 devices first made inroads
  into consumerist tastes in the fall of 1998, with
  the introduction of devices holding 32MB of flash
  memory.
• 2000 WWW size was estimated at over 1 billion
  pages.

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Hypermedia and Multimedia

• A hypertext system meant to be read nonlinearly,
  by following links that point to other parts of
  the document, or to other documents (Fig. 1.1)
• HyperMedia not constrained to be text-based,
  can include other media, e.g., graphics, images,
  and especially the continuous media sound and
  video.
• The World Wide Web (WWW) the best example of a
  hypermedia application.

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Hypermedia and Multimedia
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Hypermedia and Multimedia

• Examples of typical present multimedia
  applications include
• Digital video editing and production systems.
• Electronic newspapers/magazines.
• World Wide Web.
• On-line reference works e.g. encyclopedia,
  games, etc.
• Home shopping.
• Interactive TV.
• Multimedia courseware.
• Video conferencing.
• Video-on-demand.
• Interactive movies.

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1.3 World Wide Web

• The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has listed
  the following goals for the WWW
• Universal access of web resources (by everyone
  everywhere).
• Effectiveness of navigating available
  information.
• Responsible use of posted material.

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1.4 Overview of Multimedia Software Tools

• The categories of software tools briefly examined
  here are
• Digital Audio
• Graphics and Image Editing
• Video Editing
• Animation
• Multimedia Authoring

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Digital Audio

• Digital Audio tools deal with accessing and
  editing the actual sampled sounds that make up
  audio
• Sound Forge a sophisticated PC-based program for
  editing audioWAV files.
• Cool Edit a very powerful and popular digital
  audio toolkit emulates a professional audio
  studio sound file editing including digital
  signal processing effects.

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Graphics and Image Editing

• Adobe Photoshop the standard in a graphics,
  image processing and manipulation tool.
• Allows layers of images, graphics, and text that
  can be separately manipulated for maximum
  flexibility.
• Filter factory permits creation of sophisticated
  lighting-effects filters.
• Macromedia Fireworks software for making
  graphics specifically for the web.
• Macromedia Freehand a text and web graphics
  editing tool that supports many bitmap formats
  such as GIF, PNG, and JPEG.
• Adobe Illustrator a powerful publishing tool
  from Adobe. Uses vector graphics graphics can be
  exported to Web.

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Video Editing

• Adobe Premiere an intuitive, simple video
  editing tool for nonlinear editing, i.e., putting
  video clips into any order
• Video and audio are arranged in tracks.
• Provides a large number of video and audio
  tracks, superimpositions and virtual clips.
• A large library of built-in transitions, filters
  and motions for clips allows easy creation of
  effective multimedia productions with little
  effort.
• Adobe After Effects a powerful video editing
  tool that enables users to add and change
  existing movies. Can add many effects lighting,
  shadows, motion blurring layers.
• Final Cut Pro a video editing tool by Apple
  Macintosh only.

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Animation

• Rendering Tools
• 3D Studio Max rendering tool that includes a
  number of very high-end professional tools for
  character animation, game development, and visual
  effects production.
• Softimage XSI a powerful modeling, animation,
  and rendering package used for animation and
  special effects in films and games.
• Maya competing product to Softimage as well, it
  is a complete modeling package.
• GIF Animation Packages a simpler approach to
  animation, allows very quick development of
  effective small animations for the web.

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Multimedia Authoring

• Macromedia Flash allows users to create
  interactive movies by using the score metaphor,
  i.e., a timeline arranged in parallel event
  sequences.
• Macromedia Director uses a movie metaphor to
  create interactive presentations very powerful
  and includes a built-in scripting language,
  Lingo, that allows creation of complex
  interactive movies.

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HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

• HTML a language for publishing Hypermedia on the
  World Wide Web.
• A traditional hypertext documents is similar to a
  text file.
• The different is that a hypertext document also
  contains special symbols called tags

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HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

• HTML uses tags to describe document elements.
• The tags are in the format lttoken paramsgt to
  define the start point of a document element and
  lt/tokengt to define the end of the element.
• Some elements have only inline parameters and
  dont require ending tags.
• The most two important tags are HEAD and BODY.
• The head describes document definitions (page
  title, meta-information)
• Body part describes the document structure and
  content.

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Simple HTML page

• ltHTMLgt
• ltHEADgt
• ltTITLEgt
• A sample web page
• lt/TITLEgt
• lt/HEADgt
• ltBODYgt
• ltPgt
• Here you can put any text you like, since this
  is a paragraph element.
• lt/Pgt
• lt/BODYgt
• lt/HTMLgt

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Stages of multimedia project

• Planning
• Design and production
• Testing
• Delivery

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Planning

• The needs of a project are analyzed by outlining
  its messages and objectives.
• A plan that outlines the required multimedia
  expertise is prepared.
• A graphic template, the structure, and
  navigational system are developed.
• A time estimate and a budget are prepared.
• A short prototype or proof-of-concept is prepared

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Design and production

• The planned tasks are performed to create a
  finished product.
• The product is revised, based on the continuous
  feedback received from the client

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Testing delivery

• Testing
• The program is tested to ensure that it meets the
  objectives of the project, works on the proposed
  delivery platforms, and meets the client
  requirements.
• Delivery
• The final project is packaged and delivered to
  the end user

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Roles and responsibilities in a multimedia team.

• The project manager is responsible for
• The overall development, implementation, and
  day-to-day operations of the project.
• The design and management of a project.
• Understanding the strengths and limitations of
  hardware and software.
• Ensuring people skills and organizational skills.
• Conveying information between the team and the
  client.

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Roles and responsibilities in a multimedia team.

• Multimedia designer - This team consists of
• Graphics designers, animators, and image
  processing specialists who deal with visuals,
  thereby making the project appealing and
  aesthetic.
• Instructional designers, who make sure that the
  subject matter is presented clearly for the
  target audience.
• Interface designers, who devise the navigational
  pathways and content maps.
• Information designers, who structure content,
  determine user pathways and feedback, and select
  presentation media.
• Building a user-friendly interface.

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Roles and responsibilities in a multimedia team.

• A multimedia writer is responsible for
• Writing proposals and test screens.
• Scripting voice-overs and actors' narrations