Chapter 06: Digital Media for Work and Leisure

1
Chapter 06Digital Media for Work and Leisure
2
Objectives

• Understand the uses of digital audio and todays
  digital music technologies
• Describe the many uses of 2D and 3D digital
  graphics and the technologies behind them
• Explain the technologies available to acquire,
  edit, distribute, and print digital photos, and
  list new advances in video technologies and
  distribution
• Discuss how interactive media is used to educate
  and entertain

3
Chapter Content

• Digital Music and Audio
• Digital Graphics
• Digital Photography and Video
• Interactive Media

4
Digital Media

• Digital media encompasses digital technologies of
  all kinds that serve and support digital music,
  video, and graphics
• Multimedia or rich media
• Combines different digital media types such as
  animation and audio
• Interactive media
• Digital media that can be controlled,
  manipulated, or interacted with
• On-Demand media
• Allows users to view or listen to media at any
  time

5
Digital Music and Audio

• Digital audio
• Any type of sound recorded and stored digitally
  as a series of 1s and 0s
• Digital music
• Subcategory of digital audio that involves
  recording and storing music
• Digitization of music and audio
• Has created new challenges to the creative and
  intellectual property rights of artists

6
Digitizing Music and Audio

• Sound
• The displacement of air particles caused by
  vibration and sensed by the eardrum
• Analog
• Signals that vary continuously
• Sampling
• Used to encode sound waves as binary numbers
• Analog-to-digital converters and
  digital-to-analog converters can translate sound
  and music back and forth between digital
  representation

7
Digitizing Music and Audio
8
Digital Sound for Professionals

• Digital voice recorders
• Used to capture dialog for future reference
• Digital sound in scientific research
• Have used digital audio to study various natural
  phenomena
• Digital sound in law enforcement
• Uses digital processing to polish, enhance, edit,
  and detect sounds
• Digital sound in entertainment and communication
• Uses a wide variety of audio hardware and
  software

9
Digital Music and Audio Production

• Multitrack recording devices
• Treat each instrument or microphone as a separate
  input, or track
• Mixing board
• Adjusts the sound quality of each track
  separately
• Outboard devices
• Interconnected digital audio devices to process
  digital music and audio signals
• Synthesizer
• Sampler
• Sequencer
• Drum machine

10
Digital Music and Audio Production
11
Digital Music and Audio Production

• Musical instrument digital interface (MIDI)
  protocol
• Implemented in 1983
• Provides a standard language for digital music
  devices to use in communicating with each other
• Uses a .mid file name

12
Home Recording Studios

• Integrated digital studios
• Package many digital recording devices in one
  unit for convenient home recording
• MIDI card
• Can be installed on a computer to allow
  connections to digital music devices

13
Home Recording Studios
14
Podcasting

• Podcast
• An audio file that contains an audio broadcast
  distributed over the Internet
• Can be used on any media player that supports the
  MP3 format
• Tens of thousands of podcasts are available
• Podcast Alley, iPodder.org, Podcast Directory,
  iTunes
• RSS technology

15
Podcasting
16
Digital Music Audio Formats, Storage Media,
Players, and Software

• Digital Music and Audio File Formats
• Music is most often distributed on CD
• Increasing trend toward Internet distribution
• Native format
• Pure digitized representation of a sound
• Large files require large amounts of storage
  space if stored in their native format
• A typical CD would take about 1 GB of space

17
Digital Music Audio Formats, Storage Media,
Players, and Software

• Digital audio compression
• Uses psychoacoustic modeling to remove
  unnecessary frequencies and reduce the file size
• MP3 format compresses files to less than 10 of
  their original size
• Audio formats
• MP3
• WMA (Windows Media Audio)
• ACC (Advanced Audio Coding)
• Very few media players support all three formats

18
Digital Rights Management (DRM)

• DRM is technology that protects intellectual
  property
• Restricts the number of devices and applications
  on which the file can be opened
• Restricts the number of times the file can be
  copied or burned to a disk
• Apple and Microsoft have not agreed on a DRM
  standard

19
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
20
Digital Music and Audio Storage Media

• Digital sound has replaced vinyl records and
  cassette tapes
• Clarity, low price, longevity
• There are three primary forms of digital audio
  storage media
• CDs
• Hard drives
• Flash memory

21
Digital Music and Audio Storage Media

• CD players remain the most popular digital music
  player
• Todays CD players have additional functions
  which allow them to play CDs containing
• MP3 files
• WMA files
• ACC files
• Current CD technology offers more on-demand media
• CD-R (recordable CD)
• CD-RW (rewritable CD)

22
Digital Music and Audio Storage Media

• Music can also be stored on hard drives
• Played on the PC
• Sent to a home entertainment center
• Transferred to a digital media player
• High-capacity players use microdrives to store
  gigabytes of music
• Smaller players use flash memory
• Burned to CD

23
Digital Music Players

• Hundreds of portable digital music players are on
  the market
• Consumers must consider
• What formats the player supports
• Storage capacity
• Many cell phones double as digital music players
• Most allow transfer via USB cable
• Speaker systems are also available
• Wireless home networks can allow users to connect
  their PC to their home stereo
• Sonos

24
Digital Music Players
25
Digital Music Software

• Media player software allows users to organize
  and play digital media files
• iTunes, Windows Media Player, Zune, RealPlayer
• Synchronize (sync) through the USB port
• Numerous software utilities are available for
  working with digital music
• Jukebox software
• Ripper software
• Encoder software

26
Digital Music and Audio Distribution

• Illegal file sharing services
• KaZaA, Limewire
• Over 61 million otherwise law-abiding citizens
  illegally accessed files and copied CDs costing
  the music industry 6 billion between 1998 and
  2003
• Online music services are the legal solution
• iTunes, Microsofts Zune, Napster, Reals
  Rhapsody, and MTVs URGE

27
Digital Music and Audio Distribution
28
Digital Music and Audio Distribution

• Satellite radio
• Digital radio that receives broadcast signals via
  communications satellites
• Users can access any available channel from any
  location in range
• Services charge a monthly fee for commercial free
  music, comedy, sports, news, talk, and other
  specialty channels
• In-home, in-car, mobile options
• Users can also access over the Internet

29
Evaluating Music Options

• Considerations for choosing music services and
  technologies
• Is it legal, and if not, is it worth the risk?
• How much does it cost?
• Do you have to be connected to the Internet to
  listen?
• Do you own the music, and can you play it
  anywhere at any time on any device?
• Is it accessible at home, work, in the car, or
  walking about?
• Do you have control over the songs you hear?
• Can you listen to it with friends?

30
Evaluating Music Options
31
Digital Graphics

• Computer-based media applications that support
  creating, editing, and viewing 2D and 3D images
  and animation
• Not the exclusive domain of artists
• Artistic and nonartistic people are finding
  themselves called upon or inspired to create
  digital artwork

32
Digitizing Graphics

• Pixels
• A grid of small points
• Bit-mapped graphics or raster graphics
• Representing an image using bytes
• Ideal for representing photorealistic images
• Pixilation or fuzziness
• Occurs when bit-mapped images are made larger
  than the size at which they are captured
• Vector graphics
• Use bytes to store geometric descriptions
• Moving pictures are stored as a series of images
  called frames

33
Digitizing Graphics
34
Graphics File Formats
35
Graphics File Formats

• Lossless compression
• Allows the original data to be reconstructed
  without loss
• Lossy compression
• Accepts some loss of data to achieve higher rates
  of compression
• File sizes and image quality
• Can be controlled by adjusting the color depth

36
Uses of Digital Graphics

• Digital art
• Uses computer software as the brush and the
  computer display as the canvas
• Photographers and videographers can edit digital
  images
• Desktop Publishing
• Design page layouts for various publications
• Digital video
• Increasingly popular for presenting information
• Illustrations and maps

37
Uses of Digital Graphics

• Scientific visualization
• Uses computer graphics to provide visual
  representations that improve our understanding of
  some phenomenon
• Entertainment
• Cartoonists/comic book artists
• Motion picture industry

38
Uses of Digital Graphics

• Computer-assisted design (CAD) software
• Assists designers, engineers, and architects in
  designing three dimensional objects
• Documenting life
• Photos and home movies
• Journalism
• Collecting, managing, and manipulating photos

39
Uses of Digital Graphics
40
Vector Graphics Software

• Provides tools to create, arrange, and layer
  graphical objects on the screen
• Vector graphics
• Uses object-oriented approach that recognizes
  pictures as being made up of layers of multiple
  objects
• Primary benefit of object-oriented approach of
  vector graphics
• Objects in the picture can be manipulated
  independently

41
Vector Graphics Software
42
3-D Modeling Software

• 3-D modeling software
• Provides graphics tools that allow artists to
  create pictures of realistic 3D models
• Three-dimensional modeling
• Takes the object oriented approach of vector
  graphics to the next level
• Ray tracing
• Three-dimensional modeling

43
3-D Modeling Software
44
3-D Modeling Software

• 3-D digital art is created on a 3-D stage
• Define light source
• Surface textures
• Positioning
• Rendering
• Calculating the light interaction with the 3-D
  model

45
3-D Modeling Software
46
Computer Animation

• Digital graphics animation
• Involves displaying digital images in rapid
  succession to provide the illusion of motion
• Animated graphics
• Employ either 2D or 3D objects
• Animated GIF
• The most basic form of animation

47
Computer Animation

• More complex Web animation
• Java
• Web animation development platforms such as Adobe
  Flash
• Timeline tool helps to cue animation
• Fill in

48
Computer Animation

• 3-D Computer Animation
• Includes all the complexity of 3-D rendering
• Must also render 24 images per second to create
  the illusion of movement
• 3-D animation software
• Typically packaged with modeling software
• Range from 1595 to 13,000
• Avars
• Points on the object designed to bend or pivot at
  different angles

49
Computer Animation
50
Digital Photography

• Digital photos
• Created, or acquired, using a digital camera
• Digital cameras
• Ranked by the amount of megapixels they can
  capture
• 1 megapixel 1 million pixels
• Memory cards that come with digital cameras
• Often have limited capacity

51
Editing Digital Photos

• Photo-editing software allows you to
• Alter the hue and saturation of the colors in the
  photograph
• Smooth surfaces or remove flaws in surfaces
• Remove red eye
• Smooth edges and sharpen focus
• Crop and realign photos
• Add special effects

52
Editing Digital Photos
53
Viewing and Sharing Digital Photos

• Systems designed to show photos to groups
• As a slideshow on a television
• Digital picture frames
• Sharing over the Internet
• Flickr, Picasa, Kodak Gallery
• Upload and share cell phone pictures
• Yahoo! Go

54
Printing Digital Photos

• Printing options are bountiful
• Home printers
• Professional services
• Photo kiosks

55
Digital Video

• Digital video is accessible for personal
  enjoyment as well as professional use
• Forensic graphics
• Used to create animations and exhibits to use in
  courts of law
• Used to review the movement of athletes and
  determine how to perfect their abilities
• Used to study pedestrian and traffic patterns
• Entertainment
• Digital cable, DVDs, on-demand services

56
Digital Video
57
Creating Digital Video

• Digital camcorders
• Range from disposable 30 models to high-def
  cameras costing over 3000
• Most digital cameras and cell phones can capture
  short videos
• Low resolution, short duration

58
Editing Digital Video

• Video-editing software
• Allows professional and amateur videographers to
  edit bad footage out and rearrange the good
  footage
• Storyline
• Allows videographer to arrange video scenes
  sequentially
• Able to specify the transition effects between
  each scene
• Vlog (video log)
• Share videos with the world

59
Editing Digital Video
60
Digital Video, Television, and Movie Services

• Digital video delivery
• Internet companies that provide movie download
  and DVD delivery services
• Cell phone service with video downloads
• Mobile television services
• TivoToGo, iPod, V-Cast
• Streaming TV over the Internet or wireless
  systems
• Joost, Miro, Apple TV, live TV to PC users on
  international flights

61
Digital Video, Television, and Movie Services
62
Interactive Media

• Digital media presentations that involve user
  interaction for education, training, or
  entertainment
• Typically combines digital audio and digital
  video for a full digital media experience
• Virtual reality
• Occurs when interactive media incorporates 3D
  graphic animation

63
Interactive Media
64
Education and Training

• Research shows that most people are better able
  to comprehend complex ideas when they are able to
  interact with them via digital media
• Interactive media is being used in many education
  environments
• In the traditional classroom setting
• In distance learning
• In museums
• In skills training

65
Commercial Applications of Interactive Media

• Interactive media in Web-based e-commerce
• Provides fundamental technology for 3D product
  viewing
• Allows customers to examine products
• Used to provide product support and customer
  training
• Attracting new customers to Web sites and keeping
  them there

66
Commercial Applications of Interactive Media
67
Interactive Video Games

• Video game consoles
• Special-purpose gaming devices
• Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
• Nintendo Wii recently broke new ground
• Motion-sensitive, wireless controller
• Gaming quality has dramatically increased in
  recent years
• Minute detail and panoramic landscapes
• Handheld devices

68
Interactive Video Games

• Video game development requires a team effort
  from specialists in a variety of areas
• Game designers
• Artists, sound designers
• Programmers and testers

69
Interactive Video Games
70
Interactive TV

• A digital television service that includes one or
  more of the following
• Video on demand
• Personal video recorder
• Local information on TV
• Purchase over TV
• Internet access over TV
• Video games over TV

71
Summary

• Digital audio
• Includes both digital music and digital sound
• Digital technology is applied to all aspects of
  the music industry
• Sound wave
• Can be represented with numbers, digitally,
  through a process called analog-to digital
  conversion (ADC)
• Digital graphics
• Computer-based media applications that support
• Creating, editing, and viewing 2D and 3D images
  and animation

72
Summary

• Digital photos
• Acquired from a digital camera or scanner
• Photo-editing software
• Provides editing tools for manipulating,
  enhancing, and repairing digital photographs
• Many options for printing and distribution of
  photos are available
• Interactive media
• Multimedia presentations that involve user
  interaction for education, training, or
  entertainment