Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Computers Multimedia The Wide Spectrum Multimedia The Wide Spectrum In this paper, I will endeavor to provide you with a basic overview as to what multimedia consists of. I will also delve into the visual aspect in the wide spectrum of multimedia to show what it consists of and for a better understanding as to how it fits in. Multimedia first began with games but Web pages, interactive courses, and catalogs with sound and video have now dominated the stage. Not long ago, the term “multimedia” referred to a room full of slide projectors, tape decks, and movie projectors. Multimedia presentations were hard to put together and even harder to run. Many of them took weeks of preparation and they were then shown only once (Curtin 217). The computer has changed all of that. With multimedia, it is easier to stitch together the various elements and, once finished, the multimedia presentation is available to be shown over and over again. Multimedia is widely used in the entertainment and education fields. For entertainment, you can play computer games that seem almost alive with sound and motion. In education, interactive multimedia programs allow you to study and progress at you own pace and branch into areas of interest when you want to. You can even be a multimedia developer simply by using traditional office applications. Sounds and videos can be embedded in spreadsheet or word processor documents so when recipients click an image or click an icon they get and explanation of key points. Multimedia has entered and clung to the mainstream because of its attention-holding capabilities and effectiveness. It is used everywhere from business presentations to museum exhibits. Holiday Inn, for instance, uses it to train employees. When they click on topics, the system “talks” to them. It has reduced training time on a new property management system from 14 to 6 days (Curtin 218). Though history, and over recent years, various media have been developed that inform or entertain: paintings, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, radio, and photography ("Multimedia"). Using computers, multimedia fuses two or more of these media together on the premise that the combination is better than any of the individual components. Hence the term “multi” media. Multimedia can be used for entertainment, corporate presentations, sales presentations, education, training, kiosks, digital publications, electronic reference materials, museum exhibits and more (Geiken). One of the earliest applications of multimedia was for games, and many people thought that was what multimedia was really useful for. There is no question that multimedia can improve the quality of games and this is shown through such creations as Playstation. In the end, it is that very game-like quality that can enhance a learning experience. Parents watching their children play innovative games see how powerful multimedia is at teaching them how to read or solve math problems even thought the children perceive the experience as just a game. Building on the power of this perception, innovators have increasingly used multimedia to support all kinds of activities that are not just games ("Partial Project List"). As computer applications programs become more complex, software publishers are building multimedia presentations into their programs to introduce new features and walk the user through them. In companies, this form of presentation will take a big load off the overworked technical support staff (Curtin 218). For individuals at home or in small businesses, it will make programs easier to learn and use. Multimedia is extensively used for education and training in schools, businesses, and the home. Education that implements multimedia allows you to proceed at your own pace. It changes the boring presentations (to say the least) of the past and makes it easy to be attentive with the help of sounds, movies, animations, and interactivity (Hajick). When the Web was introduced, it was all text. Soon graphics were added and opened up new possibilities. Photographs and drawings could be used to illustrate and explain products and accessories, to demonstrate the workings of technology and nature, or just to make pages more attractive. Multimedia was introduced using tools such as Java and Shockwave ("Multimedia"). Now Web pages display animations, play sound, and allow you to interact with them. It’s possible to experience full multimedia over the Internet or intranets. Multimedia isn’t just for expensive commercial productions. It can be used to enhance ordinary communications. Using technology such as Microsoft’s OLE and ActiveX or OpenDoc, you can insert sound and movie objects into other applications such as work processing or spreadsheet documents ("Multimedia). Double clicking on the embedded icon in the document runs the media clip or plays the sound. Windows Media Player controls Multimedia-hardware devices and plays media sequences, such as video clips, animations, and sounds. Media Player can be embedded in a document belonging to another application. It lets you start, pause, and stop the sound or movie or drag a scroll bar to quickly move to a specific spot. Databases called universal servers are now able to store the elements that are displayed on the screen. Fields are used to store images, text, sound files, and videos. The multimedia program draws on these stored elements to create the show. These powerful databases, accessed over networks, are the new organizational libraries. The still images you see in multimedia programs (and many that you see in print) have been created or manipulated on a computer in a digital format. There are two basic forms of computer graphics: bitmaps and vector graphics. Bitmap images are formed from a matrix of pixels with different colors. Bitmap images are defined by their dimensions in pixels as well as by the number of colors they represent. For example, a 640 x 480 image contains 640 pixels and 480 pixels horizontally and vertically. If you enlarge a small area of a bitmap image, you can clearly see the pixels that are used to create it. When viewed normally, the small pixels merge into continuous tones much as newspaper photographs do. Each of the small pixels can be a shade of gray or a color. Using 24-bit color, each pixel can be set to any on of 16 million colors (Curtin 220).  BMP is a standard uncompressed format of Microsoft Windows and IBM OS/2. It has a maximum of 16.6 million colors (24 bits per pixel).  PCX is a Zsoft format and is used widely for paint and desktop publishing programs. It has a maximum of 16.7 million colors (24 bits per pixel).  GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) supports up to 256 colors (8 bits per pixel). It is a compressed format that keeps file sizes smaller. This format is widely used on the Web since files can be sent faster than many other formats. Files in this format have the extension .gif.  JPEG (Joint Picture Experts Group) supports 16.7 million colors (24 bits per pixel). The images are also compressed so file sizes are even smaller than GIF files. Files in this format have the extension .gpg.  TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) provides the highest quality but has large file sizes. This format supports 16.7 millions colors (24 bits per pixel) and files have the extension .tif. All photographs and paintings are bitmapped and any kind of image can be saved or exported into a bitmap format. When you print any kind of image on a laser or inkjet printer, it is first converted by the computer or printer into a bitmap form so it can be printed with the dots the printer uses (Hajicek). To edit or modify these bitmap images you use a paint program. Bitmap images are widely used but they suffer from a few unavoidable problems. They must be printed or displayed at a size determined by the number of pixels in the image. Printing or displaying one at any other size can create unwanted patterns in the image. Bitmap images have large file sizes that are determined by the image’s dimensions in pixels and color depth. To reduce this problem, some graphic formats such as GIF and JPEG store the images in compressed format (Curtin 220). Vector graphics are really just a set of graphical objects such as lines, rectangles, ellipses, arcs, or curves, called primitives that the program stores as numerical coordinates and mathematical formulas specifying their shape and position in the image (Curtin 221). Draw programs, also called vector graphics programs, are a format widely used by computer-aided design programs to create detailed engineering and design drawings, and have become popular in multimedia for 3D animation. Draw programs have a number of advantages over paint programs:  Precise control over lines and colors.  Ability to skew and rotate objects to see them from different angles or add perspective.  Ability to scale objects to any size to fit the available space. Vector graphics always print at the best resolution of the printer no matter what time you make them.  Color blends and shadings can be easily changed.  Ability to wrap text around objects. When working with a draw program, you can display the image in two views: wire frame view or shaded. In wire frame view, you see just the underlying lines in a skeletal view of the image ("Multimedia"). The image is displayed this way because it can be manipulated on the screen a lot faster. To see what the finished model looks like, you apply colors to the wire frame and display it with the wire frame covered by shaded surfaces. Various techniques are used to make images more realistic or interesting, and even put them in motion. Vector graphics come in two basic forms, 2D and 3D, 2D graphics show only length and width and 3D graphics have depth. 3D graphic programs are an extension of draw programs. You can create 3D models using a wire frame view called modeling. In a 3D image, each shape is created using a framework of polygons ("Platinum Pictures Multimedia"). To give the framework a surface or solid appearance, shading is added. In some cases, the shading is just a flat, even color. In other cases sophisticated techniques are used to create a color gradient, texture, or highlights. (Appendix) The effect of action and motion in a cartoon is created by projecting still pictures, called cells, one after another at a rate of 30 per second. When the cells are projected fast enough, the illusion is of smooth motion. Computer animation is also done by projecting a series of still images, called frames. Using animation software, you can create a beginning and ending frame for an action and after specifying these as the key frames, the computer uses a process called in-between (or tweening) to create the intermediate frames (Curtin 222). This saves a great deal of work since older cell-animation required every frame to be drawn by hand. For computers to calculate animated motion, the wireframe model is designed with joints. The animator then adjusts each joint in the structure to put it in the desired position. The science of motion called kinematics is the foundation for calculating movements, especially where there is more than one joint, as in an arm or leg. Forward kinematics calculates the positions of the elements step by step until the animation arrives at a final position. This is a well-understood process but should the final frame put a character’s hand into his chest, instead of into his pocket, inverse kinematics can be used. Here you specify the final position and calculate backward (Curtin 222). After 2D or 3D vector graphics are created in wire frame view, the next step is to give the image body and solidity. The programs used to do this are called shaders. Shaders can not only add color fills but also simulate a variety of other surfaces such as walls, metal, fabric, glass, wood, sky, and fur. A process called texture mapping can apply a bit-mapped image over a surface to give it a more realistic appearance like putting wallpaper on a wall ("Multimedia"). One form of shading is called ray tracing. Just as on a stage or movie set, you arrange light sources to illuminate the object and position your “camera” ("Integrated Services Digital Network"). The ray tracer calculates the light rays and figures out where there should be highlights and reflections on the model. The edge pixels may give an image displayed on the screen ragged edges. Anti-aliasing smoothes the edges of the image by altering the contrast and colors of its edge pixels, making the contours of the image appear truer and easier to see. Morphing blends two images to create a third. Starting with photographs of a young girl and an elderly woman, the morphed image shows someone with the characteristics of both. When done as a series of steps, an animation shows the girl growing old. To make morphing realistic, certain areas of the image, such as the eyes, must be overlapped on the first and last images and locked into place. This way, other parts of the image seen to transform around these fixed points (Curtin 223). Bibliography: Works Cited Curtin, Dennis P., et al. Information Technology: The Breaking Wave. Boston: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1998. Geiken, C. “Multimedia Design for the World Wide Web.” NCSA. 17 Dec. 1998. 1 Dec. 1999 http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Training/AdvHTML/multimedia.design.html. Hajicek, Donald J. Design Post. 1 Dec. 1999 http://www.designpost.com/defaultflash.htm. “Integrated Services Digital Network.” Bell Atlantic. 1999. 3 Dec. 1999 http://www.bell-atl.com/federal/html/isdn.htm. “Multimedia.” PC Webopaedia. 1998. 2 Dec. 1999 http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/m/multimedia.html. “Partial Project List.” Platinum Pictures Multimedia, Inc. 1999. 4 Dec. 1999 http://www.3dcafe.com/ppm/projects.htm. “Platinum’s 3D Art Gallery.” Platinum Pictures Multimedia, Inc. 1999. 4 Dec. 1999 http://www.3dcafe.com/ppm/gallery.htm. Word Count: 2178
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