Category Archives: 3. Multimedia

Image sizes

There are plenty of posts on the internet about image file sizes and image file types.

We discussed in class how to calculate image file sizes, however, it’s often hard for raw numbers to mean anything. We forget that file storage was not always the multi Gigabyte size it is now. Here is a way for you to try and get your head around it.

The new iPhone 4s’ camera has a resolution of 3264 by 2448 pixels @ 24 bits per pixel, how many uncompressed images can you fit on a standard 16GB iPhone 4s?

2007 SQA Past Paper Marking Scheme

2007 Computing SQA Exam Intro
2007 Computing SQA Exam Section 1
2007 Computing SQA Exam Section 2 Intro
2007 Computing SQA Exam Q 17
2007 Computing SQA Exam Q 18
2007 Computing SQA Exam Q 19

Topics for revision

Please revise the following for Tuesday the 19th of April

  • Anti Aliasing
  • Authoring software
  • Benefits of CLUTs
  • Benefits of video
  • Benefits of VRML
  • Calculation of Audio file size
  • Calculation of graphic file sizes
  • Codecs
  • Container Files
  • Embedding Graphics
  • Features of a sound card
  • Graphic Compression
  • MP3 Compression
  • Multimedia Design Process
  • Normalisation of sound
  • Object Oriented Graphic file size
  • Purpose of CLUTs
  • RIFF File format
  • RLE Compression
  • Sound file formats
  • Standard file formats
  • Technical issues with video
  • Transparency
  • Uses of VRML

Video Effects

Here is the making of the video I was talking about.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/drl8-vrul0c" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

It goes to show the power of special effects software. There are no explosives or squibs used.

I also found this 3D video (you will need a set of red/blue glasses). I have embedded it below but the blog does not support 3D so you will see the two camera views.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/0U0ZDjnQiXQ" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

P3 Class – Higher

Create a PowerPoint presentation that explains the main graphic filetypes with an example of each one.

Use the microphones provided to dictate your description as an audio file and embed it on each page to start automatically.

SAVE the presentation as NAB 2 (even if you don’t finish it.)

Graphic Files

We have been going over this for a while now and I have written a helpful posting over in the Information Systems blog.

However, I did come across this today and it got me looking on wikipedia and on Google.

Let me give you a comparison

JPG – 9.33KB

PNG – 48.1 KB

GIF – 18.4 KB

I have turned the compression up on the JPG to show that it uses lossy compression.  Download the images and use an image editor like irfanview to zoom into the pictures to check their quality.

Animated GIFs

“Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways.” – Wikipedia

The software used today was Styks. It allowed us to create an animation using GIF.  I asked you to save it as GIF as this is a common file format that can be edited with ease in other programs.

Most of the class then discovered that Fireworks could be used to edit the GIF and re-save it. There are other packages that allow you to edit an animated GIF, have a look for some freeware examples.

If you managed to do this then please post a blog of your finished artwork.