BCA Notes 6th Semester on Multimedia

What is Multimedia?

Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. Multimedia includes a combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content forms.

Multimedia is usually recorded and played, displayed or accessed by information content processing devices, such as computerized and electronic devices, but can also be part of a live performance. 

Multimedia also describes electronic media devices used to store and experience multimedia content. The term "rich media" is synonymous for interactive multimedia. Hypermedia can be considered one particular multimedia application.

History of Multimedia

The term "multimedia" was coined by Bob Goldstein to promote the July 1966 opening of his "LightWorks at L'Oursin" show at Southampton, Long Island. On August 10, 1966, Richard Albarino borrowed the terminology as the latest multi-media music-cum-visuals to debut as discotheque fare.  Two years later, in 1968, the term “multimedia” was re-appropriated to describe the work of a political consultant, David Sawyer, the husband of Iris Sawyer—one of the producers at L’Oursin.

In the intervening forty years, the word has taken on different meanings. In the late 1970s the term was used to describe presentations consisting of multi-projector slide shows timed to an audio track. However, by the 1990s 'multimedia' took on its current meaning.

In the 1993 first edition of McGraw-Hill’s Multimedia: Making It Work, Tay Vaughan declared “Multimedia is any combination of text, graphic art, sound, animation, and video that is delivered by computer. When you allow the user – the viewer of the project – to control what and when these elements are delivered, it is interactive multimedia. When you provide a structure of linked elements through which the user can navigate, interactive multimedia becomes hypermedia.” 

In common usage, the term multimedia refers to an electronically delivered combination of media including video, still images, audio, text in such a way that can be accessed interactively. Much of the content on the web today falls within this definition as understood by millions. Some computers which were marketed in the 1990s were called "multimedia" computers because they incorporated a CD-ROM drive, which allowed for the delivery of several hundred megabytes of video, picture, and audio data.

Categorization of Multimedia

Multimedia may be broadly divided into linear and non-linear categories. Linear active content progresses without any navigational control for the viewer such as a cinema presentation. Non-linear content offers user interactivity to control progress as used with a computer game or used in self-paced computer based training. Hypermedia is an example of non-linear content.

Multimedia presentations can be live or recorded. A recorded presentation may allow interactivity via a navigation system. A live multimedia presentation may allow interactivity via an interaction with the presenter or performer.

Multimedia presentations may be viewed in person on stage, projected, transmitted, or played locally with a media player. A broadcast may be a live or recorded multimedia presentation. Broadcasts and recordings can be either analog or digital electronic media technology. Digital online multimedia may be downloaded or streamed. Streaming multimedia may be live or on-demand.

Multimedia games and simulations may be used in a physical environment with special effects, with multiple users in an online network, or locally with an offline computer, game system, or simulator.

Application of Multimedia

Multimedia finds its application in various areas including advertisements, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics, business, scientific research and spatial/temporal applications. Several examples are as follows:

1. Creative industries

Creative industries use multimedia for a variety of purposes ranging from fine arts, to entertainment, to commercial art, to journalism, to media and software services provided for any of the industries listed below. An individual multimedia designer may cover the spectrum throughout their career.

Much of the electronic old and new media used by commercial artists is multimedia. Exciting presentations are used to grab and keep attention in advertising. Business to business, and interoffice communications are often developed by creative services firms for advanced multimedia presentations beyond simple slide shows to sell ideas or liven-up training. Commercial multimedia developers may be hired to design for governmental services and nonprofit applications as well.

2. Entertainment and fine arts

In addition, multimedia is heavily used in the entertainment industry, especially to develop special effects in movies and animations. Multimedia games are a popular pastime and are software programs available either as CD-ROMs or online. Some video games also use multimedia features. Multimedia applications that allow users to actively participate instead of just sitting by as passive recipients of information are called Interactive Multimedia. In Arts there are multimedia artists, whose minds are able to blend techniques using different media that in some way incorporates interaction with the viewer... Another approach entails the creation of multimedia that can be displayed in a traditional fine arts arena, such as an art gallery. Although multimedia display material may be volatile, the survivability of the content is as strong as any traditional media. Digital recording material may be just as durable and infinitely reproducible with perfect copies every time.

3. Education

In Education, multimedia is used to produce computer-based training courses (popularly called CBTs) and reference books like encyclopedia and almanacs. A CBT lets the user go through a series of presentations, text about a particular topic, and associated illustrations in various information formats. Edutainment is an informal term used to describe combining education with entertainment, especially multimedia entertainment.

Learning theory in the past decade has expanded dramatically because of the introduction of multimedia. Several lines of research have evolved (e.g. Cognitive load, Multimedia learning, and the list goes on). The possibilities for learning and instruction are nearly endless.

The idea of media convergence is also becoming a major factor in education, particularly higher education. Defined as separate technologies such as voice (and telephony features), data (and productivity applications) and video that now share resources and interact with each other, synergistically creating new efficiencies, media convergence is rapidly changing the curriculum in universities all over the world. Likewise, it is changing the availability, or lack thereof, of jobs requiring this savvy technological skill.

Newspaper companies all over are also trying to embrace the new phenomenon by implementing its practices in their work. While some have been slow to come around, other major newspapers like The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post are setting the precedent for the positioning of the newspaper industry in a globalized world.

4. Engineering

Software engineers may use multimedia in Computer Simulations for anything from entertainment to training such as military or industrial training. Multimedia for software interfaces are often done as collaboration between creative professionals and software engineers.

5. Industry

In the Industrial sector, multimedia is used as a way to help present information to shareholders, superiors and coworkers. Multimedia is also helpful for providing employee training, advertising and selling products all over the world via virtually unlimited web-based technology

6. Mathematical and scientific research

In mathematical and scientific research, multimedia is mainly used for modeling and simulation. For example, a scientist can look at a molecular model of a particular substance and manipulate it to arrive at a new substance.

7. Medicine

In Medicine, doctors can get trained by looking at a virtual surgery or they can simulate how the human body is affected by diseases spread by viruses and bacteria and then develop techniques to prevent it.

8. Document imaging

Document imaging is a technique that takes hard copy of an image/document and converts it into a digital format (for example, scanners).

Information Superhighway (the i-way)

The information superhighway was a popular term used through the 1990s to refer to digital communication systems and the internet telecommunications network.

It is a proposed high-speed communications system that was touted by the Clinton/Gore administration to enhance education in America in the 21st Century. Its purpose was to help all citizens regardless of their income level. The Internet was originally cited as a model for this superhighway; however, with the explosion of the World Wide Web, the Internet became the information superhighway.

The information superhighway directly connects millions of people, each both a consumer of information and a potential provider. Most predictions about commercial opportunities on the information superhighway focus on the provision of information products, such as video on demand, and on new sales outlets for physical products, as with home shopping. The information superhighway brings together millions of individuals who could exchange information with one another.

Multimedia Highway also refers to the digital communication system that is used to carry the multimedia content from one computing system to another in a network. It may be materialized using high speed fiber optics, radio frequencies, wireless links, or the usual communication subsystems like Broadband connection, ISDN, DSL, ADSL, etc.

As a part of highway infrastructure management, photographic logging systems are used widely in highway departments. However, the technology associated with current photographic logging systems is largely based on analog video technology. New technologies in digital video, the Internet, and database management have provided opportunities to overcome the limitations of analog video and improve the accessibility and functionality of photographic logging and traditional engineering databases. MMHIS (multimedia-based highway information system) is an integrated database system combining traditional highway engineering site data with visual graphic and roadway videos. The objective of developing the Web-based MMHIS was to establish a Web site and a server to provide simultaneous information retrievals of the multimedia database through the Internet and the highway agency's internal computer network.

What is a Project?

A project is usually a collaborative undertaking that involves research or design and is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.

Project Objectives

Project objectives define target status at the end of the project, reaching of which is considered necessary for the achievement of planned benefits. They can be formulated as S.M.A.R.T: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time terminated (bounded). The evaluation occurs at the project closure. However a continuous guard on the project progress should be kept by monitoring and evaluating. It is also worth noting that SMART is best applied for incremental type innovation projects

The stages of a project

Any project, be it a multimedia or a web project goes through a series of stages and each stage should be completed before other stages begin while some stages may be skipped or combined. In a multimedia project, there are four basic stages:

1. Planning and Costing:

Every project begins with an idea and we define its objectives. Before we begin working on the multimedia project we need to plan out the writing skills, graphic art, music, video and other multimedia expertise that we may require. A creative structure with a navigational system should be developed to allow our users to view the content and messages of our multimedia project. Time estimation and cost calculations become the integral part of the multimedia project. A prototype is developed just to make sure whether our project is feasible or not.

2. Designing and Producing:

Each planned tasks are performed to create a finished product. Feedback cycles are common during this stage. Feedback cycles play an important role in satisfying the end user’s expectations.

3. Testing:

Test your program to make sure that they meet the desired objectives of your project, work properly on the intended delivery platforms and meet the needs of your end users.

4. Delivering:

Package and Deliver the final product to the end user.

Basic requirements for creating a multimedia project

·         Hardware

·         Software

·         Good ideas, talent and skill

·         Time and money (for consumable resources)

·         Team work

o   Art work is performed by graphic artists

o   Video shoots by video producers

o   Sound editing by sound producers

o   Programming by programmers

However, following are the essential requirements for creating a multimedia project

1.       Hardware:

The two most significant platforms for producing and delivering multimedia projects are the Apple Macintosh OS, the Microsoft Windows OS and the Linux OS. Among them, the first two are the widely used platforms throughout the globe and most common platforms for developing and delivering the multimedia content. The Macintosh and the windows PC offers the combination of affordability, software availability, and worldwide obtainability.

The basic principles for creating and editing multimedia content are same for all types of platforms. But the compatibility issue is the major problem when we see it in the bigger picture. Still there are number of format converters for the problem of compatibility. The binary compatible files require no conversion at all. The talk about the platform-independent delivery of multimedia is still a drawback because of emerging technologies and with newer versions of web browsers being introduced in shorter period of times. These failures in delivering cross platform content consumes great amount of time.

2.       Software:

Multimedia software gives instruction to the available hardware about what to do (like displaying a certain color, moving a picture from one location to another, play a sound, turning down the volumes while a song is being played, etc)

Multimedia software tools can be divided into three types:

a)      tools like word processors and image/sound editors

-These tools are used to create multimedia elements

b)      multimedia authoring tools

-enable you to create a final application merely by linking together objects, such as a paragraph of text, an illustration, or a song. By defining the objects' relationships to each other, and by sequencing them in an appropriate order, authors (those who use authoring tools) can produce attractive and useful graphics applications. Most authoring systems also support a scripting language for more sophisticated applications

c)       tools for developing multimedia on the internet

3.       Creativity:

Before beginning a multimedia project, we must first develop a sense of its scope and content. The most precious asset to create a multimedia project is our creativity. Creativity cannot be copied but some people reverse-engineer a well created multimedia project and then create a multimedia project using similar approaches and techniques. Taking inspirations from earlier projects, good multimedia developers can modify and add their own creative touches for designing their own unique multimedia projects.

Creativity is not an in-born talent and it is very hard to learn creativity. In case of creating multimedia projects, one should know the hardware and software and all the available tools first. Once we know all the basics of our available resources, creativity comes quite easily.

4.       Organization:

It is important to develop an organized outline and a plan that easily describes the skills, time, tools, cost and resources that we may need for a project. These should be done before we start to render graphics, sounds and other components and a protocol should be established for naming the files for their quick retrieval. These files are called assets and they should be monitored throughout the project’s execution.

Multimedia Team

It is a typical team of experts for developing multimedia or it can be taken as a group of people who designs interface, scans and processes images, produces video or writes the script for a final delivery of a multimedia project.

A multimedia production team may require following discrete roles

·         Executive producer

·         Producer/Project Manager

·         Creative Director/Multimedia Designer

·         Art Director/Visual Designer

·         Artist

·         Interface designer

·         Game Designer

·         Subject matter expert

·         Instructional designer/training specialist

·         Scriptwriter

·         Animator (2D/3D)

·         Sound producer

·         Music composer

·         Video producer

·         Multimedia programmer

·         HTML coder

·         Lawyer/media acquisition

·         Marketing director

However, the following roles of the multimedia team is essential for creating any multimedia project

1.       Project Manager

A project manager’s role is at the center of the action, who is responsible for the overall development and implementation of a project as well as for day-to-day operations. Project manager budgets the project, creates schedules, manages creative sessions, regulates time sheets, invoices the project and cooperates for the team work.

A project manager has two major areas of responsibility: Design and Management. Design consists of creating a vision of the product, working out for the complete functionality with the design team and then creating the final product and adjusting it as necessary throughout the development of the product. The management side consists of scheduling and assigning tasks, running meetings, and managing the milestones that must be reached under the stipulated time. A good project manager must completely understand the strength and limitations of hardware and software so that he/she can make good decisions about what to do and what not.

2.       Multimedia Designer

A multimedia designer looks at the overall content of a project, creates a structure for the content, determines the design elements required to support that structure and decides which media are appropriate for presenting the pieces of content. In short, a multimedia designer prepares a blueprint for the entire project: content, media and interaction.

A multimedia designer is responsible to create a pleasing and aesthetic look in the multimedia project with appealing mix of color, shape and type. The project should maintain visual consistency and navigational clues like links should be clear and simple.

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

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

A multimedia designer should have following skills

·         Analysis and Presentations Skills

o   For analyzing structural content, matching with presentation methods

o   For viewing information from different points of view and should be able to shift views whenever required

·         Interpersonal skills

o   For interacting with team members, clients, and other experts

·         Technological and Human Skills

3.       Interface Designer

An interface provides control to the people who use it and provides access to the media part (text, images, graphics, animation, and audio/video) of multimedia. An interface designer enables user to move within the multimedia project with simplicity, and also to use the backgrounds, icons and control panels of the multimedia project. The role of an interface designer is to create a software that organizes the multimedia content, lets the user to access or modify that content and presents the content on the screen. Any interface essentially has three areas: information design, interactive design and media design.  A good interface designer creates a product that rewards exploration and encourages its use.

4.       Writer

Multimedia writes creates character, action, point of view and also creates interactivity. They are responsible for writing proposals, script voice-overs, and actor’s narration. They write test screens to deliver messages and they develop characters designed for an interactive environment. Writers of text screens are also called content writers and they collect information from content experts, synthesize it and communicate it in a clear and concise manner. On the other hand, script writers write dialog, narration and voice-overs.

5.       Video Specialist

A video specialist shoots and edits all the video footage, transfers the video to a computer, and prepares a complete video file for efficient delivery on CD/DVD or Web. A video specialist still needs an entire team of videographers, sound technicians, lighting designers, set designers, script supervisor, production assistants and actors.

The workflow of a successful video project starts with good video and sound material. Post production includes mixing, adding titles, creating graphics and special effects.

6.       Audio Specialist

An audio specialist make a multimedia project come alive by designing and producing music, voice-over narrations, and sound effects. They receive help from composers, audio engineers and recording technicians. They are also responsible for locating and selecting suitable music, scheduling recording sessions, digitizing and editing recorded materials into computer files.

7.       Multimedia Programmer

Also known as a software engineer, a multimedia programmer, integrates all the multimedia elements of a project into final product using an authoring system or programming language. Multimedia programming functions range from coding simple display of multimedia elements to controlling devices like CD or DVD players and managing complex timings, transitions and record keeping.

8.       The Sum of Parts

Successful multimedia projects begin with the selection of team players and selection is the beginning of a team building process that continues throughout the project. Team Building refers to the activities that help a group and the members work at the highest levels of performance by creating a working culture. Encouragement to communication and decision making models should be developed that directly respect individual talent, expertise and personalities.

Multimedia Hardware

 The selection of proper platform for developing a multimedia project is usually based on our personal preference of computer, the project delivery requirements and the type of material and content of the project. It is believed that Macintosh platform is smoother and easier than the Windows platform when it comes to developing multimedia. However, hardware and authoring tools for both of the platforms have improved greatly. Hardware and software can be easily acquired and installed in both of the platforms.

The Macintosh Platform

All Macintoshes can record and play sound and include hardware/software for digitizing and editing video and producing CD/DVD discs. Unlike the windows environment, where users can operate any application with the use of a keyboard input, the Macintosh requires a mouse.

In 1994, Apple introduced the first power Macintosh computer based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC) microprocessor and it was typically used in engineering workstations and commercial database servers. Later, Apple designed and built a new line of RISC-based models with the help of IBM and Motorola. In 1997, the G3 series was introduced with clock speed of more than 233 MHz that offered higher performance than the Pentium machines. In 2003, the G4 computers offered gigahertz speeds and with dual processor mode that increased the performance 20 times higher than the G3 while running applications like Photoshop. In 2006, Apple adopted Intel’s processor architecture that allowed Macintosh to run with any x86 operating systems.

The Windows Platform

A windows computer is a collection of parts that are tied up together by the requirements of Windows operating system like the power supplies, processor, hard disks, CD-ROM, video and audio components, monitors, keyboards, mouse. One can easily collect all the hardware parts and assemble our own computer to run windows saving considerable costs.

Today, Window’s Multimedia PC (MPC) is equipped with network support audio, CD-ROM drive, plenty of RAM and processor speed and high resolution monitor.

Hardware Peripherals

In any computing facility, hardware peripherals are required to accept the user’s input, process them and give a desired output and store them when necessary. This sums up the categorization of hardware peripherals into

·         Connection Hardware

·         Memory and Storage Devices

·         Input Devices

·         Output Devices

Connections Hardware

Connection hardware transfers all the data and instruction from the input devices for processing and subsequently yields output in the output devices. Choice of connection hardware depends upon the type of data that we are trying to transfer. A high quality video data may take more time when it is being transferred from connection hardware with less data transfer rate. The different connection hardware and their data transfer rate are shown below.

Connection	Transfer Rate
Serial Port	115 Kbit/s
Standard Parallel Port	115 Kbit/s
Original USB	12 Mbit/s
IDE	3.3-16.7 Mbit/s
SCSI-1	5 Mbit/s
SCSI-2 (Fast SCSI)	10 Mbit/s
Fast Wide SCSI	20 Mbit/s
Ultra SCSI (SCSI-3)	20 Mbit/s
Ultra IDE	33 Mbit/s
Wide Ultra SCSI	40 Mbit/s
Hi-Speed USB	480 Mbit/s
IEEE-1394 (Firewire)	100-1600 Mbit/s

SCSI (Small Computer System Interface)

Pronounced “skuzzy”, SCSI adds peripheral devices such as disk drives, scanners, CD-ROM and other devices that conform to the SCSI standard. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives, but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives.

SCSI cards can be installed in PCs, and external peripheral devices such as hard disks, CD-ROM drives, tape drives, printers, scanners etc. A separate drive letter is mounted whenever a SCSI device is connected. Floppy drives are assigned the drive letter A and B, while C drive is mounted as hard disk, CD ROM as drive D, and SCSI devices as E, F, G and so on. A typical SCSI device can connect up to 8 devices (ID numbers 0 to 7) while an ULTRA SCSI can connect up to 32 devices to a computer. Serial SCSI allows for hot swapping, improved fault tolerance and faster data rates.

(Hot swapping and hot plugging are terms used to describe the functions of replacing system components without shutting down the system)

While using SCSI we may need to adjust cable lengths and reconfigure terminating resistors. The IDs assigned to peripherals should not be either 0 or 7 and the same ID should not be assigned to two different devices.

SCSI-1 transfers data at the rate of 5 MB/s and supports up to 7 devices. SCSI-2 is divided into FAST-SCSI (10 MB/s) and WIDE SCSI (with increased bus width to 16-bit). A composite of Fast/Wide SCSI can have the transfer rate of up to 20 MB/s. SCSI-3 also known as ultra SCSI can support up to 300 MB/s.

The major advantage of SCSI is that it doesn’t demand CPU time and it is often preferred for real time video editing, network services and in situations in which writing simultaneously to two or more disks (mirroring) is required.

Memory and Storage Devices

While creating a multimedia project, one must take note of the memory and the storage devices that is available. Color images, texts, sound, video clips and the programming code all requires memory and we may need more memory if there are more elements. We also may need to allocate memory for storing and archiving working files used during production, audio and video clips, edited pieces, paperwork, and backup of our project files.

Random Access Memory

A Random Access Memory (RAM) is of volatile type and is essential in a program’s execution and for temporary data storage. In multimedia application, RAM plays a vital role. Though we have a higher processing speed but have insufficient RAM, the multimedia application may not give desired result in time. A fast processor without enough RAM may waste processor cycles while it swaps needed portions of program code into and out of memory.  Increased RAM will show more performance improvement that upgrading the processor.

Read Only Memory

Read only memory (ROM) is non-volatile and it doesn’t loose any content. ROM is used to hold small BIOS programs that boots up the computer and typically it is used in printers to hold built-in fonts. Programmable ROMs (EPROM) allow changes to be made that are not forgotten. Optical ROM (OROM) is provided in data cards and content is written once.

Floppy and Hard Disks

Adequate storage for your production environment can be provided by large-capacity hard disks; a server-mounted disk on a network; Zip, Jaz, or Syquest removal cartridges; optical media; CD-R (compact disc-recordable) discs; tape; floppy disks; banks of special memory devices; or any combination of the above.

Floppy disks and hardware disks are mass-storage devices for binary data-data that can be easily read by the computer. Hard disks can contain much more information than floppy disks and can operate at far better data transfer rates. In scale of things, floppies are, however, no longer “mass-storage” devices, and will soon be eliminated from the storage methods of choice.

A floppy disk is made of flexible Mylar plastic coated with a thin layer of special magnetic material. A hard disk is actually a stack of hard metal platters coated with magnetically sensitive material, with a series of recording heads or sensors that hover a hairbreadth above the fast-spinning surface, magnetizing or demagnetizing spots along formatted tracks using technology similar to that used floppy disk and audio and video tape recording, Hard disks are most common mass-storage device used on computers, and for marking multimedia, we need one or more large-capacity hard disk drives.

As multimedia has reached consumer desktops, makers of hard disks have been challenged to build smaller-profit, larger-capacity, faster, and less-expensive hard disk.

Zip, Jaz, Syquest, and Optical Storage Devices

For years, the Syquest 44MB removable cartridges were the most widely used portable medium among multimedia developers and professionals, but Iomega’s inexpensive Zip drives with there likewise inexpensive 100MB, 250MB, and 750MB cartridges, built on floppy disk technology, significantly penetrated Syquest’s market share for removable media. Iomega’s Jaz cartridges, built based on hard disk drive technology, provided one or two gigabytes of removable storage media and have fast enough transfer rates for multimedia development.

Magneto-optical (MO) drives use a high-power laser to hit tiny spots on the metal oxide coating of the disk. While the spot is hot, a magnet aligns the oxides to provide a 0 or 1 (on or off) orientation. Like Syquest’s and other hard disks, this is rewritable technology, because spots can be repeatedly heated and aligned. Moreover, this media is normally not affected by stray magnetism (it needs both heat and magnetism to make changes), so these disks are particularly suitable for archiving data. The data transfer rate is, however, slow compared to Zip, Jaz, and Syquest technologies. One of the most popular formats uses a 128MB-capacity disk—about the size of a 3.5-inch floppy. Larger-format magneto-optical drives with 5.25-inch cartridges offering 650MB to 1.3GB of storage are also available.

The Jaz drive was a removable disk storage system, introduced by the Iomega Company in 1995. The system as since been discontinued. The Jaz disks were originally released with a 1 GB capacity (there was also 540 MB, but it was unreleased) in a 3½-inch form factor, which was a significant increase over Iomega's most popular product at the time, the Zip drive with its 100 MB capacity. The Jaz drive utilized only the SCSI interface (the IDE internal version is rare), but an adapter known as Jaz Traveller was available to connect it to a standard Parallel Port.

The capacity was later increased to 2 GB through a drive and disk revision in 1998, before the Jaz line was ultimately discontinued in 2002.

Unlike the Zip, which is floppy disk technology, the Jaz is hard disk drive technology, utilizing rigid platters. The Jaz drive is a type of removable rigid disk (RRD) drive, with two platters (4 writable surfaces) contained within a thick cartridge with sliding door. Like the Zip disk, the Jaz disk has a reflective piece in the bottom corner so the drive may detect its capacity before loading. The drive itself contains the spindle motor, read/write heads, voice-coil actuator and drive controller. The Jaz disk is spun at approximately 5000 RPM. The Jaz drive showed much promise, with a system very similar to high-end laptop hard drives to park the heads and the drive automatically brakes the disk using reverse torque before auto-eject, unlike most of SyQuest's devices. The Jaz drive is much more fragile than the Zip drive and unlike the Zip can only be used lying horizontally on a flat surface.

SyQuest Technology, Inc., now known as SYQT, Inc., was an early entrant into the removable hard disk market for personal computers. The company was started in 1982 by Syed Iftikar; it was named partially after himself because of a company meeting wherein it was decided that "SyQuest" ought to be a shortened name for "Sy's Quest". Its earliest products were 3.9" (100mm) removable hard drives, and 3.9" (100mm) ruggedized hard drives for IBM compatibles and military applications.

For many years SyQuest held the market, particularly as a method of transferring large desktop publisher documents to printers. SyQuest aim their products to give personal computer users "endless" hard drive space for data-intensive applications like desktop publishing, Internet information management, pre-press, multimedia, audio, video, digital photography, fast backup, data exchange, archiving, confidential data security and easy portability for the road.

SyQuest 44 MB removable disk cartridge

Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)

In December 1995, nine major electronics companies (Toshiba, Matsushita, Sony, Philips, Time Warner, Pioneer, JVC, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi Electrics) agreed to promote a new optical disc technology for distribution of multimedia and feature-length movies called Digital Versatile Disc (DVD).

With this new medium capable not only of gigabyte storage capacity but also full motion video (MPEG2) and high-quality audio in surround sound, the bar has again risen for multimedia developers. Commercial multimedia projects will become more expensive to produce as consumers’ performance expectations rise. There are three types of DVD, including DVD-Read Write, DVD video and DVD-ROM. These types reflect marketing channels, not the technology.

With Dolby AC-3 Digital Surround Sound as part of the specification, six discrete audio channels can be programmed for digital surround sound, and with a separate subwoofer channel, developers can program the low-frequency doom and gloom music popular with Hollywood. DVD also supports Dolby Pro-Logic Sound, standard stereo and mono audio. Users can randomly access any section of the disc and use the slow-motion and freeze-frame features during movies. Audio tracks can be programmed for as many as 8 different languages, with graphic subtitles in 32 languages.

There are three formats for manufacturing and writing DVDs: DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW (with a plus sign), and DVD-RAM (random access memory). Dual Layer recording allows DVD-R and DVD+R discs to store more data, up to 8.5 Gigabytes per disc, compared with 4.7 Gigabytes for single-layer discs. DVD-R DL (dual layer) was developed for the DVD Forum by the Pioneer Corporation. DVD+R DL (double layer) was developed for the DVD+RW Alliance by Sony.

CD-ROM Players

Compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM) players have become an integral part of the multimedia development workstation and are an important delivery vehicle for large, mass-produced projects. A wide variety of developer utilities, graphics backgrounds, stock photography and sounds, applications, games, reference texts, and educational software are available only on the medium.

CD-ROM players have typically been very slow to access and transmit data (150 KBps, which is the speed required of consumer Red Book Audio CDs), but development have led to double-, triple-, quadruple-speed, 24x, 48x, and 56x drives designed specifically for computer (not Red Book Audio) use. These faster drives spool up like washing machines on the spin cycle and can be somewhat noisy, especially if the inserted compact disc is not evenly balanced.

CD Recorders

With a compact disc recorder, you can make your own CDs; using special mats of CD-ROM and CD-Audio. Software, such as Roxio’s Toast and Easy CD Creator, lets you organize files on your hard disk(s) into “virtual” structure, and then writes them to the CD in that order. CD-R discs are made differently than normal CDs but can play in any CD-Audio or CD-ROM player. These write-once, enhanced CDs make excellent high-capacity file archives and are used extensively by multimedia developers for pre-mastering and testing CD-ROM projects and short-run distribution of finished multimedia projects.

CD-RW

A CD-RW recorder can rewrite 700MB of data to a CD-RW disc about 1000 times. Except for their capability of totally erasing a disc, CD-RWs act similar to CD-Rs and are subject to the same restrictions. Writing sessions must be closed before they can read in a CD-ROM drive or players, and though they can be extended, in most cases they cannot be overwritten. To reuse a CD-RW, you must first blank it.

Input Device

A great variety of input devices—from the familiar keyboard and handy mouse to touch screens and voice recognitions setups—can be used for the development  and delivery of a multimedia projects. If you are designing your project for a public kiosk, use a touchscreen. If your project is for a lecturing professor who likes to wander about the classroom, use remote handheld mouse. If you create a great deal of original computer-rendered art, consider a pressure-sensitive stylus and drawing tablet.

Keyboards

A keyboard is the most common method of interaction with a computer. Keyboards provide various tactile responses and have various layouts depending upon your computer system and keyboard model. Keyboards are typically rated for at least 50 million cycles (the number of times a key can be pressed before it might suffer breakdown).               

The most commonly keyboard for PCs is the 101 style (which provides 101 keys), although many styles are available with more or fewer special keys, LEDs, and other features, such as a plastic membrane cover for industrial or food-service applications or flexible “ergonomic” styles. Macintosh keyboards connect to the USB port, which manages all form of user input—from digitizing tablets to mice. Wireless keyboards use low-powered radio or light (infrared) waves to transmit data between devices.

Mice

A mouse is a standard tool for interacting with a graphical user interface (GUI). All Macintosh computers require a mouse on PCs, mice are not required but recommended. Even though the Windows environment accepts keyboard entry in lieu of mouse point-and-click actions, your multimedia project should typically be designed with the mouse or touchscreen in mind. The buttons on the mouse provide additional user input, such as pointing and double-clicking to open a document, or the click-and-drag operation, in which the mouse button is pressed and held down to drag (move) an object, or to move to and select an item on a pull-down menu, or to access context-sensitive help. The standard Apple mouse has one button; PC mice may have as many as three.

Trackballs

Trackballs are similar to mice, except that the cursor is moved by using one or more fingers to roll across the top of the ball. The trackball does not need the flat space required by mouse, which is important in small confined environments and for portable laptop computers. Trackballs have at least two buttons: one for the user to click or double-click, and other to provide the press-and-hold condition necessary for selecting from menus and dragging objects.

Touchscreens

Touchscreens are monitors that usually have a textured coating across the glass face. This coating is sensitive to pressure and registers the location of the user’s finger when it touches the screen. The TouchMate system, which has no coating, actually measures the pitch, roll, and yaw rotation of the monitor when pressed by a finger, and determines how much force was exerted and the location where a force was applied. Other touchscreens use invisible beams of infrared light that crisscross the front of the monitor to calculate where a finger was pressed. Pressing twice n a screen in quick succession simulates the double-click action of a mouse. Touching the screen and dragging the finger, without lifting it, to another location simulates a mouse click-and-drag. A keyboard is sometimes simulated using an on-screen representation so users can input names, numbers and other text by pressing “keys”.

Touchscreens are not recommended for day-to-day computer work, but are excellent for multimedia applications in a kiosk, at a trade show, or in a museum delivery system—anything involving public input and simple tasks. When your project is designed to use a touchscreen, the monitor is the only input device required, so you can secure all other system hardware behind locked doors to prevent theft or tampering.

Magnetic Card Encoders and Readers

Magnetic card setups are useful when you need an interface for a database application or multimedia project that tracks users. You need both a card encoder and a card reader for this type of interface. The magnetic card encoder connects to the computer at a serial port and transfer information to a magnetic strip of a tape on the back of the back of the card. The magnetic card reader then reads the information encoded on the card. A visitor to a museum, for example, could slide an encoded card through a reader at any exhibit station and be rewarded with personalized or customized response from an intelligent database or presentation system. French-speaking visitors to a Norwegian museum, for instance, could hear an exhibit described in French. This is common method for reading credit card information and connecting it to your bank account.

Graphics Tablets

Flat-surface input devices are attached to the computer in the same way as a mouse or a trackball. A special pen is used against the pressure-sensitive surface of the tablet to move the cursor. Graphics tablets provide substantial control for editing finely detailed graphic elements, a feature very useful to graphic artists and interface designers. Tablets can also be used as the input devices for end users: you can design a printed graphic, place it on the surface of the tablet, and let users work with a pen directly on the input surface. On a floor plan, for instance, visitors might draw a track through the hallways and rooms they wish to see and then receive a printed list of things to note along the route. Some tablets are pressure sensitive and are good for drawing: the harder you press the stylus, for example, the wider or darker the line you draw. Graphic artists who try these usually fall prey to Vaughan’s One-Way Rule and never return to drawing with the mouse.

Scanners

A scanner may be the most useful piece of equipment you will use in the course of producing a multimedia project. There are flat-bed, handheld, and drum scanners, though the most commonly available are color, flat-bed scanners that provide a resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi) or better. Professional graphics houses may use even higher resolution drum scanners. Handheld scanners can be useful scanning small images and column of text, but they may prove inadequate for your multimedia development.

Be aware that scanned images, particularly those at high resolution and in color, demand an extremely large amount of storage space on your hard disk, no matter what instrument is used to do the scanning. Also remember that the final monitor display resolution for your multimedia project will probably be just 72 or 95 dpi—leave the very expensive ultra-high-resolution scanners for the desktop publishers. Most inexpensive flat-bed scanners offer at least 600 dpi resolution, and most allow you to set the scanning resolution.

Scans let you make clear electronic images of existing artwork such as photos, ads, pen drawings, and cartoons, and can save many hours when you are incorporating proprietary art into your application. Scans also can give you a starting point for your own creative diversions.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Devices

Scanners enable you to use optical character recognition (OCR) software, such as OmniPage from ScanSoft, a division of Nuance Communications, or Recore from Maxsoft-Ocron, an ActiveX programming interface option the allows programmers to create custom applications including web-based OCR software and a scanner, you can covert paper documents into a word processing document on your computer without retyping or rekeying.

Barcode readers are probably the most familiar optical character recognition in use today—mostly at markets, shops, and other point-of-purchase locations. Using photo cells and laser beams, barcode readers recognize the numeric characters of the Universal Product Code (UPC) that are printed in a patter of parallel black bars on merchandise labels. With OCR, or barcoding, retailers can efficiently process goods in and out of their stores and maintain better inventory control.

An OCR terminal can be use to a multimedia developer because it recognizes not only printed characters but also handwriting. This facility may be beneficial at a kiosk or in a general education environment where user friendliness is a goal, because there is growing demand for a more personal and less technical interface to data and information.

Infrared Remotes

An infrared remote unit lets a user interact with your project while he or she is freely moving about. Remotes work like mice and trackballs, except they use infrared light to direct the cursor and require no cables to communicate. Remote mice work well for a lecture or other presentation in an auditorium or similar environment, when the speaker needs to move around the room.

Voice Recognition Systems

For hands-free interaction with your projects, try voice recognition systems. These behavioral biometric systems usually provide a unidirectional cardioids, noise-canceling microphone that automatically filters out background noise and learn, to recognize voiceprints. Most voice recognition systems currently available can trigger common menu event such as Save, Open, Quit, and Print, and you can teach the system to recognize other commands that are more specific to your application. Systems available for the Macintosh and Windows environments typically must be taught to recognize individual voices and then be programmed with the appropriate responses to be the recognized word or phrase. Dragon’s Naturally Speaking takes dictation, translate text to speech and does command-to-click, a serious aid for people unable to use their hands.

Digital Cameras

Digital cameras use the same CCD technology as video cameras. They capture still images of a given number of pixels (resolution), and the images are stored in the camera’s memory to be uploaded later to a computer. The resolution of a digital camera is determined by the number of pixels on the CCD chip, and the higher the Megapixel rating, the higher the resolution of the camera. Images are uploaded from the camera’s memory using a serial, parallel, or USB cable, or, alternatively, the camera’s memory card is inserted into a PCMCIA reader connected to the computer. Digital cameras are small enough to fit in a cell phone and, in a more complicated manner they can be used in a television studio or spy camera on an orbiting space craft.

Output Hardware

Presentation of the audio and visual components of your multimedia project requires hardware that may or may not be included with the computer itself, such as speakers, amplifiers, monitors, motion video devices, sound recorders and capable storage systems. It goes without saying that the better the equipment is, of course, the better the presentation. There is no greater taste of benefits of good output hardware than to feed the audio output of your computer into an external amplifier system: suddenly the bass sound become deeper and richer, and even music sampled at low quality may sound acceptable.

Audio Devices

All Macintosh are equipped with an internal speaker and a dedicated sound chip, and they are capable of audio output without additional hardware and/or software. To take advantage of built-in stereo sound, external speakers are required.

Digitizing sound on your Macintosh requires an external microphone and sound editing/recording software.

Monitors

The monitor you need for development of multimedia projects depend on the type of multimedia application you are creating, as well as what computer you are using. A wide variety of monitors is available for both Macintoshes and PCs. High-end, large-screen graphics monitors and LCD panels are available for both, and they are expensive.

Serious multimedia developers will often attach more than one monitor to their computers, using add-on graphics boards. This is because many authoring systems allow you to work with several open windows at a time, so you can dedicate one monitor to viewing the work you are creating or designing, and you can perform various editing task in windows on other monitors that do not block the view of your work. Developing in Director is best with at least two monitors, one to view your work, the other to view the Score. A third monitor is often added by Director developers to display the card. For years, one of the advantages of the Macintosh for making multimedia was that it is very easy to attach multiple monitors for development work. Connecting with Windows 98, PCs can be configured for more than one monitor.

Video Devices

No other contemporary message medium has the visual impact of video. With a video digitizing board installed in your computer, you can display a television picture on your monitor. Some boards include a frame-grabber feature for capturing the image and turning it into a color bitmap, which can be saved as a PICT or TIFF file ant then used as part of a graphic or a background in your project.

Display of video of any computer platform requires manipulation of an enormous amount of data. When used in conjunction with videodisc players, which give you precise control over the images being viewed, video cards let you place an image into a window on the computer monitor; a second television screen dedicated to video is not required. And video cards typically come with excellent special effects software.

There are many video cards available today. Most of these support various video-in-a-window sizes, identification of source video, setup of play sequences or segments, special effects, frame grabbing, digital moviemaking; and some have built-in television tuners so you can watch your favorite programs in a window while working on other things. Good video greatly enhances your project; poor video will ruin it.

Projectors

When you need to show your material to more viewers than can huddle around a computer monitor, you will need to project it onto a large screen or white-painted wall. Cathode-ray tube (CRT) projectors, liquid crystal display (LCD), Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors and Liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) projectors and (for larger projects) Grating-Light-Valve (GLV) technologies are available. CRT projectors have been around for quit a while—they are the original “big-screen” televisions. They use three separate projection tubes and lenses (red, green, and blue), and the three color channels of light must “converge” accurately on the screen. Setup, focusing, and alignment are important for getting a clear and crisp picture. CRT projectors are compatible with the output of most computers as well as televisions.

LCD panels are portable devices that fit in a briefcase. The panel is placed on the glass surface of a standard overhead projector available in most schools, conference rooms, and meeting halls. While the overhead projector does the projection work, the panel is connected to the computer and provides the image, in thousands of colors and, with active-matrix technology, at speeds that allow full-motion video and animation. Because LCD panels are small, they are popular for on-the-road presentations, often connected to a laptop computer and using a locally available, overhead projector.

More complete LCD projection panels contain a projection lamp and lenses and do not require a separate overhead projector. They typically produce an image brighter and sharper than the simple panel model, but they are somewhat larger and cannot travel in a briefcase.

DLP projectors (it’s done with mirrors) use a semiconductor chip arrayed with microscopic mirrors that are laid out in a matrix know as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), where each mirror represent one pixel in the projected image. Rapid repositioning of the mirrors reflects light out through the lens or to a heatsink (light dump).

Liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS or LCos) is a micro-display technology mostly used for projection televisions. It is a reflective technology similar to DLP projectors but it uses liquid crystals instead of individual mirrors.

Grating-Light-Valves (GLVs) compete with high-end CRT projectors and use diffraction of laser (rd, green and blue) light using an array of tiny movable ribbons mounted on a silicon base. The GLV uses six ribbons as the diffraction gratings for each pixel. The alignment of the gratings is altered by electronic signals. This displacement controls the intensity of the diffracted light. These units are expensive, but the image from a light-valve projector is very bright and color-saturated and can ne projected onto screens as wide as ten meters, at any aspect ratio.

Communication Devices

Many multimedia applications are developed in a workgroups comprising instructional designers, writers, graphic artists, programmers, and musicians located in the same office space or building. The workgroup members’ computers are typically connected on a local area network (LAN). The client’s computers, however, may be thousands of miles distant, requiring other methods for good communication.

Communication among workgroup members and with the client is essential and accurate completion project. Normal U.S. Postal Service mail delivery is too slow to keep pace with most projects; overnight express services are better. And when you need it immediately, an Internet connection is required. If your client and you are both connected to the Internet, a combination of communication by e-mail and by FTP (File Transfer Protocol) may be the most cost-effective and efficient solution for both creative development ant project management.

In the workplace, use quality equipment and software for your communications setup. The cost—both time and money—of stable and fact networking will be returned to you.

Modems

Modems can be connected to your computer externally at the serial port or internally as a separate board. Internal modems often include fax capability. Be sure you have a Hayes compatible modem. The Hayes AT standard command set (named for the ATTENTION command that precedes all other commands) allows you to work with most software communications packages.

Modem speed, measured I baud, is the most important consideration. Because the multimedia files that contain the graphics, audio resources, video samples, and progressive versions of your project are usually large, you need to move as much data as possible in as short a time as possible. Today’s standards dictate at least a V.90 56 kbps modem. Compression saves significant transmission time and money, especially over long distance. Today, tens of millions of people use a V.90 modem to connect to the Internet.

Modems modulate and de-modulate analog signals. According to the laws of physics, copper telephone lines and the switching equipment at the phone companies’ central offices can handle modulated analog signals up to about 28,000 bps on “clean” lines, so 56 kbps V.90 depends on hardware based compressing algorithms to crunch the data before sending it, decompressing it upon arrival at the receiving end. If have already compressed your data into a .sit, .sea, .arc, or .zip file, you may reap added benefit from the compression because it is difficult to compress an already-compressed file.

ISDN and DSL

For higher transmission speeds by telephone, you will need to use Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDN), Switched-56, T1, T3, DSL, ATM, or another of the telephone companies’ Digital Switched Network services.

ISDN lines offer a 128 Kbps data transfer rate—twice as fast as a 56 Kbps analog modem. ISDN lines (and the required ISDN hardware) are used for Internet access, networking, and audio and video conferencing. These dedicated telephone lines are more expensive than conventional analog or POTS (plain old telephone service) lines, so analyze your costs and benefits carefully before upgrading.

Newer and faster Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology using a dedicated copper line has overtaken ISDN in popularity. DSL uses signal frequencies higher than those used by voice or fax. When a DSL filter is connected to your phone jack, it splits the data (Internet) traffic from voice (phone) traffic, so voice traffic (talking on the phone and fax signals) goes to the phone or the fax machine while data traffic (surfing the web, downloading large files or photos) goes to your computer. You can do both at the same time.

Basic Software Tools

The basic tool set for building multimedia projects contains one or more authoring system and various editing application for text, images, sounds, and motion video. A few additional applications are also useful for capturing images from the screen, translating file formats, and moving files among computers when you are part of team-these are tools for the housekeeping tasks that make your creative and production life easier.

Text Editing and Word Processing Tools

A word processor is usually the first software tool computer users learn. From letters, invoices, and storyboards to project content, your word processor may also be your most often used tool, as you design and build a multimedia project. The better our Keyboarding or typing skill is, the easier and more efficient our multimedia day-to-day life will be.

Typically, an office or workgroup will choose a single word processor to share documents in a standard format. And most often, that word processor comes bundled in an office suite that might include spreadsheet, database, e-mail, web browser, and presentation applications.

Word processors such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect are powerful applications that include spell checkers, table formatters, thesauruses, and prebuilt templates for letters, resumes, purchase orders, and other common documents. In many word processors, you can actually embed multimedia elements such as sounds, images, and video. Luckily, the population of single-finger typists is decreasing over times as children are taught keyboarding skills in conjunction with computer lab programs in their schools.

Painting and Drawing Tools

Painting and drawing tools, as well as 3-D modelers, are perhaps the most important items in your toolkit because, of all the multimedia elements, the graphical impact of your project will likely have the greatest influence on the end user. If your artwork is amateurish, or flat and uninteresting, both you and your users will be disappointed.

One should look for these features in a drawing or painting packages:

§  An intuitive graphical user interface with pull-down menus, status bars, palette control, and dialog boxes for quick, logical selection

§  Scalable dimensions, so you can resize, stretch, and distort both large and small bitmaps

§  Paint tools to create geometric shape, from squares to circles and from curves to complex polygons

§  Ability to pour a color, patterns and clip art

§  Customizable pen and brush shapes and sizes

§  Eyedropper tool that turn bitmap shapes into vector-based outlines

§  Support for scalable text fonts and drop shadows

§  Multiple undo capabilities, to let you try again

§  History function for redoing effects, drawings, and text

§  Property inspector

§  Screen capture facility

§  Painting features such as smoothing coarse-edged objects into the background with anti-aliasing; airbrushing in variable sizes, shapes, densities, and patterns; washing colors in gradients; blending; and masking.

§  Support for third-party special-effect plug-ins

§  Object and layering capabilities that allow you to create separate elements independently

§  Zooming, for magnified pixel editing

§  All common color depth: RGB, HSB, Grayscale, CMYK

§  Good palette management and dithering capability among color depths using various color models such as RGB, HSB, and CMYK

§  Good file importing and exporting capability for  image formats such as PIC, GIF, TGA, TIFF, PNG, WMF, JPG, PCX, EPS, PTN, and BMP

§  TGA also known as TARGA is an acronym for Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter; TGA is an initialism for Truevision Graphics Adapter

§  PCX = "Personal Computer eXchange

§  Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) is a standard file format for importing and exporting PostScript files. It is usually a single page PostScript program that describes an illustration or an entire page. The purpose of an EPS file is to be included in other pages. Sometimes EPS files are called EPSF files. EPSF simply stands for Encapsulated PostScript Format.

§  PTN: PaperPort Thumbnail Image

3-D Modeling and Animation Tools

3-D modeling software has increasingly entered the mainstream of graphic design as its case of use improves. As a result, the graphic production values and expectation for multimedia projects have risen. With 3-D modeling software, objects rendered in perspective appear more realistic; we can create stunning scenes and wander through them, choosing just the right lighting and perspective for our final rendered image. Powerful modeling packages such as AutoDesk’s  Maya, Strata 3D, and Avid’s SoftImage are also bundled with assortments of pre-rendered 3-D clip art objects such as people, furniture, buildings, cars, airplanes, trees, and plants. Specialized applications for creating and animating 3-D text are discussed. Important for multimedia developers, many 3-D modeling applications also include export features enabling you to save a moving view or journey through your scene as a Quick Time or MPEG file. Each rendered 3-D image takes from a few seconds to a few hours to complete, depending upon the complexity of the drawing and the number of drawn objects included in it. If you are making a complex walkthrough or flyby, plan to set aside many hours of rendering time on your computer.

                  A good 3-D modeling tool should include the following features:

§  Multiple windows that allow you to view your model in each dimension, from the camera’s perspective, and in a rendered preview

§  Ability to drag and drop primitive shape into a scene

§  Ability to create and sculpt organic objects from scratch

§  Lathe and extrude features

§  Color and texture mapping

§  Ability to add realistic effects such as transparency, shadowing, and fog

§  Ability to add spot, local, and global lights, to place them anywhere, and manipulate them for special lighting effects

§  Unlimited cameras with focal length control

§  Ability to draw spline-based paths for animation

§  Spline modeling, also known as patch modeling, is an efficient alternative to using polygons for modeling. A spline in 3D modeling is a line that describes a curve. The curve is defined by a number of points. The curved spline can then be lathed or extruded to create 3D geometry. A mesh created from intersecting splines consists of areas called patches.

Image-Editing Tools

Image-editing applications are specialized and powerful tools for enhancing and retouching existing bitmapped images. These applications also provide many of the features and tools of painting and drawing programs and can be used to create images from scratch as well as images digitized from scanners, video frame-grabbers, digital cameras, clip art files, or original artwork files created with a painting or drawing package.

Here are some features typical of image-editing applications and of interest to multimedia developers:

§  Multiple windows that provide views of more than one image at a time

§  Conversion of major image-data type and industry-standard file formats.

§  Direct inputs of images from scanner and video sources

§  Employment of a virtual memory scheme that uses hard disk space as RAM for images that require large amounts of memory

§  Capable selection tools , such as rectangles, lassos, and color balance

§  Good masking features

§  Multiple undo and restore features

§  Anti-aliasing capability, and sharpening and smoothing controls

§  Color-mapping controls for precise adjustment of color balance

§  Tools for retouching, blurring, sharpening, lightening, darkening, smudging, and tinting

§  Geometric transformations such as flip, skew, rotate, and distort, and perspective changes

§  Ability to resample and resize an image

§  24-bit color, 8- or 4-bit indexed color, 8-bit gray-scale, black-and –white, and customizable color palettes

§  Ability to create images from scratch, using line, rectangle, square, circle, ellipse, polygon, airbrush, paintbrush, pencil, and eraser tools, with customizable brush shapes and user-definable bucket and gradient fills

§  Multiple typefaces, styles, and sizes, and type manipulation and masking routines

§  Filters for special effects, such as crystallize, dry brush, emboss, facet, fresco, graphic pen, mosaic, pixelize, poster, ripple, smooth, splatter, stucco, twirl, watercolor, wave, and wind

§  Support for third-party special-effect plug-ins

§  Ability to design in layers that can be combined, hidden, and reordered

OCR Software

Often we have printed matter and other text to incorporate into our project, but no electronic text file. Using optical character recognition (OCR) software, a flat-bed scanner, and our computer, we can save many hours of retyping printed words, and get the job done faster and more accurately than a roomful of typists.

OCR software turns bitmapped characters into electronically recognizable ACSCII text. A scanner is typically used to create the bitmap. Then the software breaks the bitmap into chunks according to whether it contains text or graphics, by examine the texture and density of areas of the bitmap and by detecting edges. The texture areas of the image are then converted to ASCII characters using probability and expert system algorithms. Most OCR applications claim about 99 percent accuracy when reading 8 to 36-point printed characters at 300 dpi and can reach processing speeds of 150 characters per second. These programs do, however, have difficulty recognizing poor copies of originals where the edges of characters have bled; these and poorly received faxes in small print may yield more recognition errors than it is worthwhile to correct after the attempted recognition.

Sound Editing Tools

Sound editing tools for both digitized and MIDI sound let us see music as well as hear it. By drawing a representation of a sound in fine increments, whether a score for a waveform, we can cut, copy, paste, and otherwise edit segments of it with great precision—something impossible to do in real-time.

System sounds are shipped with both Macintosh and Windows systems, and they are available as soon as you install the operating system. System sounds are the beeps used to indicate an error, warning, or special user activity. Using sound editing software, we can make our own sound effects and install them as system beeps. We will need to install software for editing digital sounds.

We can usually incorporate MIDI sound files into our multimedia project without learning any special skills but to make our own MIDI files we require clear understanding about the way music is sequenced, scored, and published. We need to know about tempos, clefs, notations, keys, and instruments. And we will need a MIDI synthesizer or device connected to our computer. Many MIDI applications provide both sequencing and notation capabilities, and some let us edit both digital audio and MIDI within the same application.

Animation, Video, and Digital Movie Tools

Animations and digital video movies are sequence 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 spirits, to generate an appearance of motion. Most authoring tools adopt either a frame-or object-oriented approach to animation, but rarely both.

Moviemaking tools typically take advantage of QuickTime for Macintosh and Windows and Macintosh Video for Windows, also known as Audio Video Interleaved (AVI), and lets us create, edit, and present digitized motion video segments, usually in a small window in our project.

To make movies from video, we may need special hardware to convert the analog video signal into digital data. Macs and PCs with FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports can import digital video directly from digital camcorders. Moviemaking tools such as Premiere, Final Cut Pro, VideoShop, and MediaStudio Pro let us edit and assemble video clips captured from camera, tape, other digitized movie segments, animations, scanned images, and from digitized movie segments, animations, scanned images, and from digitized audio or MIDI files. The completed clip, often with added transition and visual effects, can then be played back—either stand-alone or windowed within our project.

Video Formats

Formats and systems for sorting and playing digitized video to and from disk files are available with QuickTime and AVI. Both systems depend on special algorithms that control the amount of information per video frame that is sent to the screen, as well as the rate at which new frames are displayed. Both provide a methodology for interleaving, or blending, audio data with video and other data so that sound remains synchronized with the video. And both technologies allow data to stream from disk into memory in a buffered and organized manner. DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) is a hardware format defining a very dense, two-layered disc that uses laser light and, in the case of recordable discs, heat to store and read digital information. The digital information or software on a DVD is typically multiplexed audio, image, text, and video data optimized for motion picture display using MPEG encoding.

QuickTime is an organizer of time-related data forms. Classic videotape involves a video track with two tracks of (stereo) audio; QuickTime is a multitrack recorder in which you can have an almost unlimited range of tracks. Digitized video, digitized video, digitized sound, computer animations, MIDI data, external devices such as CD-ROM players and hard disks, and even the potential for interactive command systems are all supported by the QuickTime format. With QuickTime, you can have a movie with five different available languages, titles, MIDI cute tracks, or the potential for interactive commands.

Compression Movie Files

Image compression algorithms are critical to the delivery of motion video and audio on both the Macintosh and PC platforms. Without compression, there is simply not enough bandwidth on the Macintosh or PC to transfer the massive amounts of data involved in displaying a new screen image every 1/30 of a second.

To understand compression, consider these three basic concepts:

• Compression ratio: The compression ratio represent the size of the original image divided by the size of the compressed image—that is, how much the data is actually compressed. Some compression schemes yield ratios that are dependent on the image content: a busy image of multicolored tulips may yield a very small compression ratio, and an image of blue ocean and sky may yield a very high compression ratio. Video compression typically from image to image (the delta).
• Image quality: Compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossy schemes ignore picture information that the viewer may not miss, but that means the picture information is in fact lost—even after decompression. And as more and more information is in fact lost—even after decompression. And as more and more information is removed during compression, image quality decreases. Lossless schemes preserve the original data precisely—an important consideration in medical imaging, for example. The compression ratio typically affects picture quality because, usually, the higher the compression ratio, the lower the quality of the decompressed image.
• Compression/decompression speed: You will prefer a fast compression time while developing your projects. Users, on the other hand, will appreciate a fast decompression time to increase display performance.

For compressing video frames, the MPEG format used for DVD employs three types of encoding: I-Frames (Intra), P-Frames (Predicted), and B-Frames (Bi-directional Predicted). Each type crams more or less information into the tiniest possible storage space. For example, B- and P-Frames only contain information that has changed from one frame to the next, so a sequence from a “talking head” interview might only contain data for the movement of lips (as long as the rest of the subject is still). B- and P-Frames cannot be played on their own, then, because they contain only the information about the lips that changed; the complete image is based on the data stored in the I-Frame. Sequences of these frame types are complied into a GOP (Group of Pictures), and all GOPs are stitched into a stream of images. The result is an MPEG video file.

Multimedia Authoring Tools

Multimedia authoring tools provide the important framework you need for organizing and editing the elements of your multimedia project, including graphics, sounds, animations, and video clips. Authoring tools are used for designing interactivity and the user interface, for presenting your project on screen, and for assembling diverse multimedia elements into a single, cohesive product.

Authoring software provides an integrated environment for binding together the content and functions of your project, and typically includes everything you need to create, edit, and import specific types of data; assemble raw data into a playback sequence or cue sheet; and provide a structured method or language for responding to user input. With multimedia authoring software, you can make

• Video productions
• Animations
• Games
• Interactive web sites
• Demo disks and guided tours
• Presentations
• Kiosk applications
• Interactive training
• Simulations, prototypes, and technical visualization

Types of Authoring Tools

This chapter arranges the various multimedia authoring tools into groups, based on the method used for sequencing or organizing multimedia elements and events:

• Card- or page-based tools
• Icon-based, event-driven tools
• Time-based tools

Card-based or page-based tools are authoring systems, wherein the elements are organized as pages of a book or a stack of cards. Thousands of pages or cards may be available in the book or stack. These tools are best used when the bulk of your content consists of elements that can be viewed individually, like the pages of book or cards in a card file. The authoring system lets you link these pages or cards into organized sequences. You can jump, on command, to any page you wish in the structured navigation pattern. Card- or page-based authoring systems allow you to play sound elements and launch animations and digital video.

Icon- or object-based, event-driven tools are authoring systems, wherein multimedia elements and interaction cues (events) are organized as objects in a structural framework or process. Icon- or object-based, event-driven tools simplify the organization of your project and typically display flow diagrams of activities along branching parts. In complicated navigational structures, this charting is particularly useful during development.

Time-based tools are authoring systems, wherein elements and events are organized along a timeline, with resolutions as high as or higher than 1/30 second. Time-based tools are best to use when you have a message with a beginning and an end. Sequentially organized graphic frames are played back at a speed that you can set. Other elements (such as audio events) are triggered at a given time or location in the sequence of events. The more powerful time-based tools let you program jumps to any locations in a sequence, thereby adding navigation and interactive control.

Objects

In multimedia authoring systems, multimedia elements and events are often treated as objects that live in a hierarchical order of parent and child relationships. Messages passed among these objects order them to do things according to the properties or modifiers assigned to them. In this way, for example, Teen-child (a teenager object) may be programmed to take out the trash every Friday evening, and does so when they get a message from Dad. Spot, the puppy, may bark and jump up and down when the postman arrives, and defined by barking and jumping modifiers. Objects typically take care of themselves. Send them a message and they do their thing without external procedures and programming. Objects are particularly useful for games, which contain many components with many “personalities”, all for simulating real-life situations, events, and their constituent.

Different Stages of Authoring

There are five distinct stages of multimedia authoring:

• Analysis What do you need to do and what do you use to do it?
• Design Create storyboards to tell the story of the project.
• Development Incorporate data and set it up as a prototype or model.
• Evaluation When the prototype application works the way you want it to, test it again, fine-tune it, make it sexy, and then review your work.
• Distribution When it is ready to go (after the evaluation phase), make it real, package and distribute it.

There are two basic kinds of computer font file data formats

Bitmap fonts consist of a series of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size.
Outline fonts (also called vector fonts) use Bézier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulae to describe each glyph (writing element), which make the character outlines scalable to any size.
Bitmap fonts are faster and easier to use in computer code, but inflexible, requiring a separate font for each size. Outline fonts can be resized using a single font and substituting different measurements, but are somewhat more complicated to use than bitmap fonts as they require additional computer code to render the outline to a bitmap for display on screen or in print.

True Type
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts.

The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes. TrueType has long been the most common format for fonts on Mac OS and Windows, although both also include native support for Adobe's Type 1 format.

PostScript (PS) is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. PostScript fonts are outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting, which uses PostScript file formats like .pfb (printer font binary-PC), .afm (adobe font metric-MAC) and .pfa (printer font ASCII-LINUX) to encode font information. PostScript ATM (Adobe Type Manager) has many formats of PostScript fonts like Type 0, Type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 14, 32, 42.

Animation

Animation makes static presentation comes alive. It is defined as a visual change over time that adds great power to our multimedia projects and web pages. Many multimedia applications for both Macintosh and Windows provide animation tools.

Principles of Animation

Animation is possible because of a biological phenomenon known as persistence of vision and a psychological phenomenon called phi. An object seen by the human eye remains chemically mapped on the eye’s retina for a brief time after viewing. Combined with the human mind’s need to conceptually complete a perceived action, this make 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.

Television video builds 30 entire frames or pictures every second; the speed with which each frames is replaced by the next one makes the images appear to blend smoothly into movement. Movies on film are typically shot at a shutter rate of 24 frames per second.

Animation by Computer

Using appropriate software and techniques, we can animate visual images in many ways. The simplest animations occur in two-dimensional (2-D) space; more complicated animations occur in an intermediate “2^1/2-D” space where shadowing, highlights, and forced perspective provide an illusion of depth, the third dimension; and the most realistic animations occur in three-dimensional (3-D) space.

In 2-D space , the visual changes that bring an image alive occur on the flat Cartesian x and y axes of the screen. A blinking word, a color-cycling logo (where color changes rapidly) or a button or tab that changes state on mouse rollover to let a user know it is active are all examples of 2-D animations. These are simple and static, not changing their position on the screen. Path animation in 2-D space increases the complexity of an animation and provides motion, changing the location of an image along a predetermined path during a specified amount of time. Authoring and presentation software such as Flash or PowerPoint provide user-friendly tools to compute position changes and redraw an image in a new location.

In 2^1/2-D animation, an illusion of depth (the z axis) is added to an image through shadowing and highlighting, but the images itself still rests on the flat x and y axes in two dimensions. Embossing, shadowing, beveling, and highlighting provide a sense of depth by raising an image or cutting it into a background.
In 3-D animation, software creates a virtual realm in three dimensions, and changes (motion) are 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 to move towards or away from the viewer, or, in this virtual space of light sources and points of view, allowing the viewer to wander around and get a look at all the object’s parts from all angles. Such animations are typically rendered frame by frame by high-end- 3-D animation programs such as NewTek’s lightwave or AutoDesk’s Maya.        

Animation Techniques

While creating an animation, we have to organize its execution into a series of logical steps. First, we have to gather up all the activities we wish to provide in the animation. If it is complicated, we may wish to create a written script with a list of activities and required objects and then create a storyboard to visualize the animation. Second, we choose the animation tool that is best suited for the job, and then build and tweak the sequences. This may include creating objects, planning their movements, texturing their surface, adding lights, experimenting with lighting effects, and positioning the camera or point of view. We should allow plenty of time for this phase when we are experimenting and testing. Finally, we have to post-process the animation, by doing special renderings and adding sound effects.

Cel Animation

The animation techniques made famous by Disney use a series of progressively different graphics or cels on frame of movie film (which plays at 24 frames per second). A minute of animation may thus require as many as 1,440 separate frames, and each frame may be composed for many layers of cels. The term cel drives from the clear celluloid sheets that were used for drawing each frame, which have been replaced today by layers of digital imagery. Cels of famous animated cartoons have become sought-after, suitable-for-framing collector’s items.

Cel animation artwork begins with keyframes. For example, when an animated figure of a woman walks across the screen, she balances the weight of her entire body on one foot and then other in a series of falls and recoveries, with the opposite foot and leg catching up to support the body. Thus the first keyframe to portray a single step might be the woman pitching her body weight forward off the left foot and leg, while her center of gravity shifts forward; the feet are close together, and she appears to be falling. The last keyframe might be the right foot and leg catching the body’s fall, with the center of gravity now centered between the outstretched stride and the left and right feet positioned far apart.

The series of frames in between the keyframes are drawn in a process called tweening.  Tweening is an action that requires calculating the number of frames between keyframes and  the path the action takes, and then actually sketching with pencil the series of progressively different outlines. As tweening progresses, the action sequence is checked by flipping through the frames.

Kinematics

Kinematics is the study of the movement and motion of structures that have joints, such as a walking man. Animating a walking step is tricky: you need to calculate the position, rotation, velocity, and acceleration of all the joints and articulated parts involved- knees bends, hips flex, shoulders swing, and the head bobs. e-frontier’s Poser, a 3-D modeling program, provides pre-assembled adjustable human models in many poses, such as “walking” or “chinking”.  Surface textures can then be applied to create muscle-bound hulks. Inverse Kinematics, available in high-end 3-D programs such as Lightwave and Maya, is the process by which we link objects such as hands to arms and define their relationship and limits (for example, elbows cannot bend backwards). Once those relationships and parameters have been set, we can then drag these parts around and let the computer calculate the result.

Morphing

Morphing is a popular effect in which one image transforms into another. Morphing applications and other modeling tools that offer this can transition not only between still images but often between moving images as well.

Animation File Formats

The different animation file format includes Director (.dir and .dcr), Animation Pro (.fli using 320 x 200 pixel images and .flc), 3D Studio MAX (.max), SuperCard and Director (.pics), CompuServe GIF89a(.gif) and Flash (.fla and .swf). Since file size is a critical factor for all animation formats while downloading them in the internet, selection of appropriate file compression technique is an essential part of preparing animation for the web. For example, a Director’s native file format (.dir) must be preprocessed and compressed into a proprietary shockwave animation file (.dcr) for the web. This compression decreases at least 75% file size significantly speeding up the download and display time in the internet. Flash, which is widely used animation application for web, uses vector graphics to keep post compression file size minimum. The native .fla files must be converted into Shockwave Flash file (.swf) to be able to play in the web. To view animations in the web, certain plugins, players or add-ons like Flash player are required.

With 3-D animation, the individual rendered frames of an animation are put together into one standard digital video file format like Windows Audio Video Interleaved (.avi), QuickTime(.qt and .mov) or Motion Picture Experts Group video (.mpeg or .mpg). These files can be played using the media players that come with the computer operating systems.

Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion. With video elements in our project, we can effectively present our message. But carelessly produced video may degrade our presentation. Video requires the highest performance, memory and storage on our computer than any other multimedia elements. To deliver the video across network, we may use superfast RAID (Redundant array of independent disks) system that support high speed data transfer rates.

How Video Works

When the light reflected from an object passes through a video camera lens, the light is converted into an electronic signal by a special sensor called a charged-coupled device (CCD). The output of the CCD is then processed by the camera into a signal containing three channels of color information and synchronization pulses. There are several video standards available for managing the CCD output, and each standard differs with the amount of separation between the components of the signal. The more separation of color information of the signal, higher will be the quality of the image. If each channel of color information is transmitted as a separate signal, the signal output is called RGB, and is the preferred method for higher quality and professional video production. The output can also be separated into two separate chroma (color) channels, Cb/Cr (Blue and red chromas) and a luma component channel (Y) that makes the dark and light parts of the video.

In analog systems, the video signal from the camera is delivered to the video-in connectors of a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder), where it is recorded on a magnetic videotape. One or two channels (mono or stereo) of sound can be recorded on the videotape. The video signal is written on the tape by a spinning recording head that changes the local magnetic properties of the tape's surface in a series of long diagonal stripes. Since the VCR head is tilted at an angle as compared to the path of the tape, it follows a helical or spiral path which is known as helical scan recording. A single video frame is made up of two fields that interlaced and audio is recorded in a separate straight-line track at the top of the videotape. At the bottom of the tape is a control track that contains the pulses used to regulate speed. A term called tracking is used for making fine adjustment of the tape so that the tracks are properly aligned as the tape moves across the playback head.

In digital system, the video signal from the camera is first digitized as a single frame and the data is compressed before it is written to the tape in any of the formats like DV (Digital Video), DVCPRO (Digital Video Cassette Professional) or DVCAM (Digital Video Camcorder). In a professional situation, other configurations of video tapes are available which are used with high end video production with high end equipments.

Colored phosphors on the CRT screen glows red, green or blue when they are energized by the electron beam. As the intensity of the beam varies while it moves across the screen, some colors glow brighter than others. There are finely tuned magnets around the picture tube that aims the electrons precisely into the phosphor screen. So any speakers with strong magnets if placed aside a CRT display may change the intensity of color at certain parts. A strong external magnetic field will skew the electron beam to one area of screen and sometimes may cause a permanent blotch that could not be fixed even by degaussing. Degaussing is an electronic process that readjusts the magnets that guides the electrons.

Broadcast Video Standards

Analog Video Standards

There are three analog broadcast video standards that are commonly in use around the world. They are: NTSC, PAL and SECAM. The NTSC standard is being phased out by ATSC (Advanced television system committee) Digital Television standard in the United States. All these standards and formats are not easily interchangeable, so we have to know where our multimedia project will be implemented. A video cassette in United states that uses NTSC standard may not play on a television set in Europe that uses PAL or SECAM even though the recording method and style of the cassette is VHS (video home system). Each system is based on different standards that define the way information is encoded to produce the electronic signal that creates the television picture. Multiformat VCRs can play almost all three standards but cannot dub from one standard to another. Dubbing between standards require high-end and specialized equipments.

NTSC (National Television Standards Committee)

• Used for broadcasting and displaying video in United states, Canada, Mexico, Japan and other countries
• Established in 1952 by National Television Standards Committee
• Defines a method for encoding information into an electronic signal that ultimately creates television picture (signal)
• A single frame of video is made up of 525 horizontal scan lines drawn into the inside face of a phosphor coated picture tube in every 1/30^th of a second by a fast moving electron beam.
• The drawing occurs so fast that human eye perceives the images as stable.
• The electron beam makes two passes (at the rate of 60 per second, or 60Hz) while it draws a single video frame
• First it lays down all the odd-numbered lines and then all the even-numbered lines
• Each of the passes paints a field and two fields are combined to create a single frame at a rate of 30 frames per second
• This process of creating a single frame from two fields is known as interlacing, which prevents flicker on television sets.
• Computer monitors uses a progressive scan technology that draws the lines of an entire frame in a single pass without interlacing and flicker.

PAL (Phase alternate line)

• Used in United Kingdom, Western Europe, Australia, South Africa, China and South America
• PAL increases the screen resolution to 625 horizontal lines but slowed down the scan rate to 25 frames per second.
• Just like in NTSC, the even and odd lines are interlaced, each field taking 1/50^th of a second to draw a field at 50 Hz.

 SECAM (Sequential Color and Memory)

• SECAM taken from the French name, Systeme Electronic pour Coleur Avec Memoire or Sequentiel Couleur Avec Memoire
•  Used in France, Eastern Europe, former USSR, and a few other countries.
• Although SECAM 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. Often, however, TV sets sold in Europe utilized dual components and could handle both PAL and SECAM systems.

ATSC DTV

• Federal Communications Commissions initiated the High Definition Television (HDTV) in the 1980s, was first changed into the Advance Television (ATV) initiative and then finished as the Digital Television (DTV) in 1996.
• This standard, which was slightly modified from both the Digital Television Standard (ATSC Doc. A/53) and the Digital Audio Compression Standard (ATSC Doc. A/52), moved U.S television from an analog to digital standard.
• It provided TV stations with sufficient bandwidth to present four or five Standard Television (STV, providing the NTSC’s resolution of 525 lines with a 3:4 aspect ratio, but in a digital signal) signals or one HDTV signal (providing 1080 lines resolution with a movie screen’s 16:9 aspect ratio).
• More significantly for multimedia producers, this emerging standard allows for transmission of data to computers and for new ATV interactive services.

           

           

High Definition Television (HDTV)

• Provides high resolutions in a 16:9 aspect ratio.
• This aspect ratio allows the viewing of Cinemascope and Panavision movies.
• There is confusion between the broadcast and computer industries about whether to use interlacing or progressive-scan technologies. The broadcast industries has promulgated an ultra-high resolution, 1920x1080 interlaced format to become the milestone of a new generation of high-end entertainment centers, but the computer industry would like to settle on a 1280x1080 format provides more pixels then the 1280x720 standard, the refresh rate are quite different.
• The higher-resolution interlaced format delivers only half the picture every ¹/₆₀ of a second and because of the interlacing, on highly detailed images there is a great deal of screen flicker at 30 Hz.
• The computer people argue that the picture quality at 1280x720 is superior and steady. Both formats have been included in the HDTV standard by the Advanced Television system Committee (ATSC)
• While more and more video is produced only for digital display platforms (for the Web, for a CD-ROM tour, or as an HDTV DVD presentation), analog television while still used, are rapidly being replaced by digital monitors that are becoming the most widely installed platform for delivering and viewing video.

Digital Display Standards

• Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) is the digital television standard for the United States, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, and South Korea. It is being considered in other countries. It support high screen aspect ratio of 16:9 with images up to 1920x1080 pixels in size and number of other image sizes, allowing up to six standard-definition “virtual channels” to be broadcast on a single TV station using the existing 6 MHz channel. It boasts of “theater quality” because it uses Dolby Digital AC-3 format to provide 5.1 channel surround sound.
• Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is used mostly in Europe where the standards define the physical layer and data link layer of a distribution system.
• Integrated System Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) is used in Japan to allow radio and television stations to convert to digital format.