Fundamentals of Multimedia, Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Introduction to Multimedia 1.1 What is Multimedia? 1.2 Multimedia and Hypermedia 1.3 World Wide Web 1.4 Overview of Multimedia Software Tools 1.5 Further Exploration
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1.1 What is Multimedia?
When dierent people mention the term multimedia, they seem to have quite dierent, 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, visualization, computer vision, data compression, graph theory, networking, database systems.
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Components of Multimedia
Multimedia involves multiple modalities of text, audio, images, drawings, animation, and video. Examples of how these modalities are put to use:
1. Video teleconferencing. 2. Distributed lectures for higher education. 3. Tele-medicine. 4. Co-operative work environments that allow business people to edit a shared document, or school children to share a single game using two mice that pass control back and forth. 5. Searching in (very) large video and image databases for target visual objects. 6. Augmented reality: placing real-appearing computer graphics and video objects into scenes such that the physics of objects and lights, such as shadow appearance, is properly taken into account. 7. Including audio cues for where video-conference participants are located. Taking into account gaze direction and attention of participants as well.
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8. Building searchable features into new video, and enabling very highto very low-bit-rate use of new, scalable multimedia products. 9. 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. Making components distributed. 10. Building inverse-Hollywood applications that can re-create the process by which a video was made. This then allows storyboard pruning and concise video summarization. 11. Using voice-recognition to build an interactive environment, say a kitchen-wall web browser.
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Multimedia Research Topics and Projects
To the computer science researcher, multimedia consists of a wide variety of topics: 1. Multimedia processing and coding: multimedia content analysis, content-based multimedia retrieval, multimedia security, audio/image/video processing, compression, etc. 2. Multimedia system support and networking: network protocols, Internet, operating systems, servers and clients, quality of service (QoS), and databases. 3. Multimedia tools, end-systems and applications: hypermedia systems, user interfaces, authoring systems. 4. Multi-modal interaction and integration: ubiquity web-everywhere devices, multimedia education including Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, and design and applications of virtual environments.
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Current Multimedia Projects
Many exciting research projects are currently underway. Here are a few of them: 1. Camera-based object tracking technology: tracking of the control objects provides user control of the process. 2. 3D motion capture: used for multiple actor capture so that multiple real actors in a virtual studio can be used to automatically produce realistic animated models with natural movement. 3. Multiple views: allowing photo-realistic (video-quality) synthesis of virtual actors from several cameras or from a single camera under diering lighting. 4. 3D capture technology: allow synthesis of highly realistic facial animation from speech.
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5. Specic multimedia applications: aimed at handicapped persons with low vision capability and the elderly a rich eld of endeavor. 6. Digital fashion: aims to develop smart clothing that can communicate with other such enhanced clothing using wireless communication, so as to articially enhance human interaction in a social setting. 7. Electronic Housecall system: an initiative for providing interactive health monitoring services to patients in their homes 8. Augmented Interaction applications: used to develop interfaces between real and virtual humans for tasks such as augmented storytelling.
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1.2 Multimedia and Hypermedia
History of Multimedia:
1. Newspaper: perhaps the rst mass communication medium, uses text, graphics, and images. 2. Motion pictures: conceived of in the 1830s in order to observe motion too rapid for perception by the human eye. 3. Wireless radio transmission: Gugliemo Marconi, at Pontecchio, Italy, in 1895. 4. Television: the new medium for the 20th century, established video as a commonly available medium and has since changed the world of mass communications. 5. The connection between computers and ideas about multimedia covers what is actually only a short period: 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote a landmark article describing what amounts to a hypermedia system called Memex. Link to full Vannevar Bush 1945 Memex article, As We May Think
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1960 Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext. 1967 Nicholas Negroponte formed the Architecture Machine Group. 1968 Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the On-Line System (NLS), another very early hypertext program. 1969 Nelson and van Dam at Brown University created an early hypertext editor called FRESS. 1976 The MIT Architecture Machine Group proposed a project entitled Multiple Media resulted in the Aspen Movie Map, the rst hypermedia videodisk, in 1978. 1985 Negroponte and Wiesner co-founded the MIT Media Lab. 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web 1990 Kristina Hooper Woolsey headed the Apple Multimedia Lab. 1991 MPEG-1 was approved as an international standard for digital video led to the newer standards, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and further MPEGs in the 1990s. 1991 The introduction of PDAs in 1991 began a new period in the use of computers in multimedia. 1992 JPEG was accepted as the international standard for digital image compression led to the new JPEG2000 standard.
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1992 The rst MBone audio multicast on the Net was made. 1993 The University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications produced NCSA Mosaic the rst full-edged browser. 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 rst made inroads into consumerist tastes in the fall of 1998, with the introduction of devices holding 32MB of ash memory. 2000 WWW size was estimated at over 1 billion pages.
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Hypermedia and Multimedia
A hypertext system: meant to be read nonlinearly, by following links that point to other parts of the document, or to other documents (Fig. 1.1) HyperMedia: not constrained to be text-based, can include other media, e.g., graphics, images, and especially the continuous media sound and video. The World Wide Web (WWW) the best example of a hypermedia application. Multimedia means that computer information can be represented through audio, graphics, images, video, and animation in addition to traditional media (i.e., text and graphics drawings).
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Hypertext Normal Text
Linear
"Hot spots" Nonlinear
Fig 1.1: Hypertext is nonlinear
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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. encyclopedias, games, etc. Home shopping. Interactive TV. Multimedia courseware. Video conferencing. Video-on-demand. Interactive movies.
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1.3 World Wide Web
The W3C has listed the following goals for the WWW: 1. Universal access of web resources (by everyone everywhere). 2. Eectiveness of navigating available information. 3. Responsible use of posted material. History of the WWW 1960s- Charles Goldfarb et al. developed the Generalized Markup Language (GML) for IBM. 1986 The ISO released a nal version of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
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1990 Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). 1993 NCSA released an alpha version of Mosaic based on the version by Marc Andreessen for X-Windows the rst popular browser. 1994 Marc Andreessen et al. formed Mosaic Communications Corporation later the Netscape Communications Corporation. 1998 The W3C accepted XML version 1.0 specications as a Recommendation the main focus of the W3C and supersedes HTML.
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HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) HTML (HyperText Markup Language) XML (Extensible Markup Language) SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language)
1.3.2-1.3.5 optional reading.
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1.4 Overview of Multimedia Software Tools
The categories of software tools briey examined here are: 1. Music Sequencing and Notation 2. Digital Audio 3. Graphics and Image Editing 4. Video Editing 5. Animation 6. Multimedia Authoring
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Music Sequencing and Notation
Cakewalk: now called Pro Audio. The term sequencer comes from older devices that stored sequences of notes (events, in MIDI). It is also possible to insert WAV les and Windows MCI commands (for animation and video) into music tracks (MCI is a ubiquitous component of the Windows API.) Cubase: another sequencing/editing program, with capabilities similar to those of Cakewalk. It includes some digital audio editing tools. Macromedia Soundedit: mature program for creating audio for multimedia projects and the web that integrates well with other Macromedia products such as Flash and Director.
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Digital Audio
Digital Audio tools deal with accessing and editing the actual sampled sounds that make up audio: Audition (was Cool Edit): a very powerful and popular digital audio toolkit; emulates a professional audio studio multitrack productions and sound le editing including digital signal processing eects. Sound Forge: a sophisticated PC-based program for editing audio WAV les. Pro Tools: a high-end integrated audio production and editing environment MIDI creation and manipulation; powerful audio mixing, recording, and editing software.
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Graphics and Image Editing
Adobe Illustrator: a powerful publishing tool from Adobe. Uses vector graphics; graphics can be exported to Web. 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 exibility. Filter factory permits creation of sophisticated lighting-eects lters.
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.
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Video Editing
Adobe Premiere: an intuitive, simple video editing tool for nonlinear editing, i.e., putting video clips into any order: Video and audio are arranged in tracks. Provides a large number of video and audio tracks, superimpositions and virtual clips. A large library of built-in transitions, lters and motions for clips eective multimedia productions with little eort. Adobe After Eects: a powerful video editing tool that enables users to add and change existing movies. Can add many eects: lighting, shadows, motion blurring; layers. Final Cut Pro: a video editing tool by Apple; Macintosh only.
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Animation
Multimedia APIs: Java3D: API used by Java to construct and render 3D graphics, similar to the way in which the Java Media Framework is used for handling media les. 1. Provides a basic set of object primitives (cube, splines, etc.) for building scenes. 2. It is an abstraction layer built on top of OpenGL or DirectX (the user can select which). DirectX : Windows API that supports video, images, audio and 3-D animation OpenGL: the highly portable, most popular 3-D API in use today. Local version 22 Li & Drew
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Rendering Tools: 3D Studio Max: rendering tool that includes a number of very high-end professional tools for character animation, game development, and visual eects production. Softimage XSI: a powerful modeling, animation, and rendering package used for animation and special eects in lms and games. Maya: competing product to Softimage; as well, it is a complete modeling package. RenderMan: rendering package created by Pixar. GIF Animation Packages: a simpler approach to animation, allows very quick development of eective small animations for the web.
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Multimedia Authoring
Macromedia Flash: allows users to create interactive movies by using the score metaphor, i.e., a timeline arranged in parallel event sequences. Macromedia Director: uses a movie metaphor to create interactive presentations very powerful and includes a builtin scripting language, Lingo, that allows creation of complex interactive movies. Authorware: a mature, well-supported authoring product based on the Iconic/Flow-control metaphor. Quest: similar to Authorware in many ways, uses a type of owcharting metaphor. However, the owchart nodes can encapsulate information in a more abstract way (called frames) than simply subroutine levels.
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1.5 Further Exploration Link to Further Exploration for Chapter 1.
In Chapter 1 of the Further Exploration directory, the website provides links to much of the history of multimedia. Other links in the text website include information on:
Ted Nelson and the Xanadu project. Nicholas Negropontes work at the MIT Media Lab. Douglas Engelbart, and the history of the On-Line System. The MIT Media Lab Negroponte and Wiesner co-founded the MIT Media Lab, and that lab is still going strong it is arguably the most inuential ideas factory in the world. Client-side execution. Java and client-side execution started in 1995. JAVA Applet, is also on the textbook website: Link to Duke. Duke, the rst
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