Information technology infrastructure library
Multimedia has brought about a cultural revolution in our daily lives. Multimedia is used effectively whenever an interface connects a person to any kind of electronic information. It has brought about the convergence of computer, communication and entertainment. Multimedia has become so much a part of our daily life that we never bother to get awed by the word multimedia. Be it presentation, ad clippings, or a training course, multimedia is everywhere. What multimedia has done, it has enhanced the overall quality of the information we are viewing, by adding a different variety of media like animation, audio, video, etc.
Multimedia has been defined differently by different categories of people. Some define it in digital video support and activity, other include still images, audio, graphics, text. Multimedia as the name suggests means many media.
So multimedia is defined as woven combination of text, graphics, art, sound, animation and video elements.
When the end user or the viewer is able to control what elements are delivered and when, it is called interactive multimedia.
When a structure of linked elements is provided through which the user can navigate and is interactive as well, that is called hypermedia.
And when such a linked structures consists only of text, as media it is a hypertext.
COMPONENTS OF MULTIMEDIATEXT:
Textual words are the most common and of ancient symbols of communication. And text forms are backbone of a user interface in a multimedia presentation. Text is generally used in multimedia menus and should be chosen carefully at design time by using typeface that usually includes many sizes and styles. A particular character looks little different in a specific type style.
SOUND/AUDIO:Sound is the one of the most crucial element of multimedia. It may be a music clip or a meaningful speech in a particular language or some special effect like background music. For giving sound effect we need capabilities to make sound and to incorporate sound in the work. Sound part of multimedia is stored in a file like the text is stored in a text file.
For a multimedia project sound can be managed in two ways.
Musical Instrument Digital Interface(MIDI) file
Digital audio data
PICTURES/IMAGES
Still images have been in use much before video came in and added a new dimension to the presentation. There are so many things which only images can depict, no account of text would be sufficient for it.
Images are generated by computer in two ways :
As bitmaps, used for photo type of images and complex drawings requiring finer details.
As vector-drawn, used for lines, boxes, circles, polygon, etc.
The appearance of both the type of images depends on the resolution of the monitor and the capabilities of graphics hardware used in a particular system.
IMAGE COMPRESSION
Images occupy a lot of space, so image compression techniques have been devised so that image is stored in a compressed manner and when displayed it is decompressed.
The most common compression is the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG)scheme. There are two terms which are used in the compression technology very commonly-lossy and lossless.
A lossy compression is one which results in degradation of images while displaying it and lossless is one in which the quality of image is the same as it was at the time of capturing the image.
ANIMATION:
A multimedia project can be animated to accentuate the effect of the presentation. Visual effects such as fades, zoom, etc., are available in many imaging and text editing packages. But animation is more than this. Animation is an object moving in or out of the screen, a ball bouncing, etc. this should ideally be accompanied with a sound effect. Animation was the primary source of dynamic action in a multimedia presentation. Animation is based on the principle of perception by human eye, that is, image of an object remains mapped on the eye's retina for a short while after viewing. If images are rapidly changed with slight change in location and shape of the object the eye perceives it as an moving object. Animations are stored in variety of file formats depending on the authoring software. Some commonly used extensions are.DIR,.Fli,.AVI,.MAX etc.
VIDEO:
Video is the most fascinating component of a multimedia presentation. It adds the flavor of life to it. Standards for digital text, images, animation and sound have been established much more video, as it being the most recent inclusion. Vedio component of the multimedia makes maximum demands on the computer memory and processing speed. So a lot of research is going on in the field of vedio storage, compression and tranmission over networks.*
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