Multimedia

Lecture

This week we were covering different types of digital media. We started by discussing what multimedia is, "Multimedia is the media that uses multiple forms of information content and information processing (e.g. Text, Audio etc...) to inform or entertain the user." (WIkipedia, 2007). This was followed by an introduction to digital media, this is a media source that is digitally stored such as a text file. We were then shown a list of different media types that are all classes as digital media, these included text, clipart, graphics, animation, sound and video files. Linking these to websites, there used to me hypertext links linking to all media but now there are a lot of links that use hypermedia links which take the user straight to the file. This was followed by a look at e-books where there was a project to try and digitize all books, this was called "Project Guttenberg", "This is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works. Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library."(Wikipedia, 2007). We then started talking about types of graphics such as bitmap and vectors, bitmaps are now converted into most commonly JPEG's to reduce pixelation when they are adjusted, vector graphics use equations so this is not a problem. Moving onto digitised sound we were told about .wav files as well as MP3's, some digital video files are .mov, .avi, .mpeg and .wmv. After we had covered the lecture notes we were show several sites that were flash based, one of which was the stereophonics website. To end the lecture we were shown a flash animation called "Animation vs Animator".

This is the Animation vs Animator flash production.

Tutorial

In this weeks tutorial we were set a task of analyzing the university website. We were working in groups for this activity and to start we decided as a group whether we liked the website. This was then followed by what we thought were the strengths and weaknesses of the site. We then had a checklist where we had to look through the university website and answer questions asked, an example of a question was "Does the website have a glossary?". These were tick box with the choices Yes, No and N/A. The following questions were about the questions and how they assessed the website. Near the end of the tutorial we went through different answers that the class had come up with in their groups.

Reflection

I really enjoyed this weeks lecture on multimedia, i thought it covered all of the different types of digital media well as a good introduction to the topic, I knew a lot of the file types before so i found it quite easy as well. I'm interested in this topic so i searched for more information about digital media also i wasn't sure what Flash Paper files were so i searched for that too, links are given in external reading bellow. Near the end of the lecture we started listening/watching different types of media. First of all we started with the stereophonics website where we listened to a clip on their flash based website. We then went on to some flash videos, of which one was called "Why robots shouldn't walk dogs." i thought that this flash production was amazing, (the flash clips we watched are on http://www.henningb.com/ ) towards the end of the lecture we watched Animation vs Animator, which i loved, it was an amazingly done flash production. While searching around the web i found a sequel to the Animation vs Animator.

Animation vs Animator II

External Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_media http://theopensourcery.com/osrevFlashPaper.htm

Dancey