Chapter 1 Introduction to Multimedia Mr. Nael A. Aburas

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

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

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

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

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

Where to use multimedia? Education Broadcasting & Entertainment Research & Development Health

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

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

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

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

Benefits of using multimedia in software Ease of use User friendly, increase user’s effectiveness. Intuitive Interface Allows user to determine functions of an application by their own intuition. Immersive Experience Software application takes over the entire computer screen, allows user to focus on application.

Benefits of using multimedia in software Better understanding Simultaneous presentation of different media provides richer & broader range of information. Cost effectiveness Less training, less technical support.

Evaluating Multimedia Products Evaluation can be done from two perspectives: User’s Perspective Developer’s Perspective Subject and Content Content Platform Performance Usability Delivery Cost Interface

User’s perspective Subject /content Area of interest Entertainment value – multimedia game and sports – related products Education, training or learning objectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hypermedia and Multimedia

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

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

1.4 Overview of Multimedia Software Tools The categories of software tools briefly examined here are: Digital Audio Graphics and Image Editing Video Editing Animation Multimedia Authoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) HTML uses tags to describe document elements. The tags are in the format <token params> to define the start point of a document element and </token> to define the end of the element. Some elements have only inline parameters and don’t require ending tags. The most two important tags are HEAD and BODY. The head describes document definitions (page title, meta- information) Body part describes the document structure and content.

Simple HTML page <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> A sample web page </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <P> Here you can put any text you like, since this is a paragraph element. </P> </BODY> </HTML>

Stages of multimedia project Planning Design and production Testing Delivery

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

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

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

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

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

Roles and responsibilities in a multimedia team. A multimedia writer is responsible for: Writing proposals and test screens. Scripting voice-overs and actors' narrations