Using flash

Today we were able to make our photoshop image into a proper website in flash, we were able to make all the pages we need to and embed a video into the home page along with adding all the pictures to the gallery.

Understanding principles of digital video technology in interactive media

This is an essay to explain how designers use video technology to enhance a user’s interactive experience. The internet is hugely responsible for the change in videos and advertising; due to the huge popularity of it companies are always trying to improve what they can offer to their clients.

The most popular online video player is Youtube; this is one of many sites that have changed our video experience due to the fact that it shows user generated content. This means that anyone can post a video that they have made of anything on to the site for an audience to watch and comment on. This is a huge change since it allows people to express themselves for free as opposed to having to pay to properly produce it. This has also allowed a number of people to get a career through the things that they have posted.  Youtube provides a good interactive experience to users as the video can be watched straight away rather than having to wait for it to download, this is called streaming. This is used in order to allow slow internet users faster buffering but the price for this is the quality of the video.

The one main problem that this has caused is copyrighting work.

Some of the users on Youtube like to record videos, these could be from the TV or they could have been downloaded from the internet. This is a problem for Youtube as certain videos are protected by the Digital Rights Management System; it stops the illegal distribution of copyrighted data meaning that they have to find a way to stop you uploading things that you do not have the right to upload. They state when you sign up for an account “Uploading materials that you do not own is a copyright violation and against the law. If you upload material you do not own, your account will be deleted.” (See ‘http://www.youtube.com/create_account?feature=idx_promo_std&next=’)  This is used to deter users from uploading copyrighted data but if they do, they encourage other users to report them. This is all down to the Digital Rights Management System that is in place, sometimes data is encrypted so that it can only be viewed by those that are allowed and can also be encrypted so that no one can claim for work that isn’t theirs. Also another method that has become popular on sites with professional photographers or those that put a lot of effort in to their work like to use a water mark so that others cannot steal their work. This is also occasionally used on Youtube since it is much easier to take someone’s work and re-upload it as your own the users have watermarked them so that other users can clearly see that someone else made it.

Something that can affect the quality of the video is whether the file is compressed or not.

Often videos can be huge file size so they have to be compressed to reduce the size, this can be done in two different ways, the first is called lossy and is the most popular because it allows the files to be reduced in file size by losing some of the data and reducing the quality but the thing that makes it so popular is that you have to take away a lot of information before the video losses quality. The other form of file compression is lossless which makes sure that it is kept to a much higher quality because of the quality they are maintaining the file size doesn’t become much smaller which is why it is used less than lossy.

 Although Youtube is free you are often forced to watch an advert if the video you decided to watch is popular enough, which leads me on to my next topic.

Adverts have been developed to use digital video technology, normally unless you were watching an advert on TV it would be a still picture but now using video, companies have been able to catch a viewers attention better. Adverts will often now be small video clips that catch the user’s eye more effectively than with still pictures. Added audio is probably the most annoying but effective thing about these adverts, your forced to find the source of the noise to turn it off or you’ll have to wait for it to finish, it may be annoying but the companies achieved what they were trying to do and that was get your attention.  The company will have to have paid out a fair bit of money to get a good high quality video that the user will be drawn to, if the video wasn’t clear the user wouldn’t pay much attention to it and not take notice of the message that they are tying to put across.

Youtube uses adverts as its form of income so although users don’t have to pay they are watching the videos that make Youtube money. What Youtube does is called Direct advertising the advert that they play has relevance to the video, for example they might advertise a certain genre of music they may advertise another artist of the same genre.

Another way that companies can make money through their users is by using them for viral marketing. This can also be known as “Word of Mouth” the company creates a message that can be passed along by others across the internet. This was the way that hotmail decided to advertise themselves, every time someone used hotmail to send a message at the bottom of the email they would have a link to their site. This is also relevant to videos, “Viral videos can best be described as short video clips with unusually shocking or humorous themes” (see http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-viral-videos.htm) they are normally found through Facebook or other socialising sites . Facebook games are probably the most likely as when you play them you have to send invites to your friends in order to get something out of the game, they are then able to post on your friends page advertising their game to them and who ever looks on it. Another thing that uses the internet in order to advertise itself are places that allow virtual tours, these are videos of an area that allow you to “look” around an area, the effectiveness of this is that it lets you experience better what the area is going to be like, videos are much better to use than pictures because they are more believable, both can be edited but by making everything continue the viewer feels like they are there whereas still image are not able to provide the same experience that videos can, they lack movement, noise and authenticity.

Companies are always trying to out do each other in forms of quality. A clear example of this is video players; some of these are flash player and Quicktime who are always making newer versions of their players to make them better. They advertise themselves by talking about increasing higher quality user experience. Flash says “Flash Player 10.1 is optimized for high performance” (see http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/) and Quicktime similarly say “Whether it’s on the web or on your desktop, QuickTime Player brings your digital media brilliantly to life” (see http://www.apple.com/quicktime/). By looking at these two companies you can see that everyone is trying to outdo each other in terms of what they can offer but they are all trying to improve the same things.

Many things still have a lot of ways to improve technologies, one thing that has risen in popularity recently is internet access on mobile phones, the internet is a lot slower because it is wireless and does not have a cable. The data transfer rate is much slower than if it were a computer with an internet cable access meaning the videos take a lot longer to buffer and the mobile isn’t always able to handle how much it would have to download from the site to run effectively. This is evidently going to be something that companies are going to look into improving as it would be more convenient for users to be able to view videos with a faster buffering rate anywhere much like the internet connection we are able to have at home.

Everything is starting to look towards the benefits that high quality video can have on viewers experience from the video. Due to the increasing in quality it is now preferable to watch a video online as it saves you from having to wait for it to come on the TV. Now designers have also to make sure that there are ways of protecting copyrighted data from being used and to make sure that nothing can be viewed by people that shouldn’t be seeing it. These examples all show how digital video technology is being used to increase every user’s interactive experience. Companies are tying to thoroughly improve the quality of the videos online and decrease the of amount file size as these are the main things that users are looking for. Another thing that is improving their works to fit with the rising demand of high quality is Youtube, they have gone from just videos to let you view them in HD so it’s pretty clear due to the popularity of the site that it will continue to broaden it horizons to new demands. “YouTube is currently testing out the idea of 3D videos by offering a few 3D View Style options” (see http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q309-youtube-3d-videos/) this function is already available to keep up with the popularity that 3D movies have brought to the cinema screen but has yet to really take off as it is expensive for the users to make as a 3D camera is needed. There are a few existing 3D videos but it looks like that in a few years that 3D will be as normal as HD on the Youtube channel.

Vector Vs Bitmap

Both vector and bitmap are two different types of image files. Vector is used for simple images such as logo's and maps, these can be edited through things such as size whereas bitmap is better use for more detailed images such as photographs. Bitmap uses lots of different colours to make the images more detailed than a vector image, but due to this the main problem is that the size can't be adjusted without the image getting "Pixelated ".

Bitmap

These images are also known as raster images and are made up of all different pixels of colour on a grid, all these dots are what you see in the whole image. By doing this they are creating much more detail. Even the images that seem to be one whole block of colour are also made up of individual colour pixels. With a bitmap image the larger the resolution the more detailed the image is, due to this when you rescale an image the pixels are effected and the image looks less detailed, this also takes effect when you zoom in to the image, you can see that the pixels are bigger so the image starts to look fuzzy and different.

Also another effect of this is when drawing a diagonal line, because it is entered on to a grid it looks like a lot of squares so in order to make it look more like a line you have to make it more detailed, for example in a picture you would have to have the pixels on either side of the image a shade lighter so that the image doesn’t just have block squares and blends well together.

Due to the detail of each picture that in made in a bitmap form your printer has to be able to cope with printing with a lot of image data, in fact your printer has to cope with more than the screen does. The printer needs to be able to handle 150-300 in order  to print off bitmap images correctly and detailed, many people face problems with this as the images on the screen can turn out different to what actually comes out on paper. This is because of DPI and PPI, PPI stands for pixels per inch and initially accounts for what is on the screen, where as DPI stands for dots per inch and is a term used on printers. Pixels are the individual colours made up on the screen whereas dots are the number of drops of ink that the printer is laying down on the paper, so the higher the DPI the better the printer is and the more detailed images it can print. The PPI is simply the number of pixels per inch on the screen that consist of different colours to make a whole colour, this in effect will mean that one pixel could be made up of three dot of colour when printed.

Although bitmap is good for detail it does not easily support transparency saying that only two file formats are best these are .GIF and .PNG. Even so both of these formats have problems,  .GIF is has limitations on the number of colours you can use and .PNG was created after .GIF to eliminate these problems and is not always supported. Also with .GIF you have no choice to make it slightly transparent you either have the pixel coloured or transparent. Which can cuase problems if you later decide that you want to colour in the background as only the transparent pixels will be coloured and the coloured could leave the edge of the picture a completely different colour to the rest.

(Please double click on image to activate .gif)

Vector

Vector images are not as commonly used as bitmap images as they do not provide as much detail but are better suited to making things such as logos. Vector images allow you edit things whereas you face problems with bitmap when you try to due to the pixels. With vector images you can rescale objects and fill them with different colours you can also draw curves. This has allowed us to use fonts which are a type of vector image, you are able to rescale an image to a large size and still have smooth edges to the lines and curves.

One of the main advantages of using vector images compared to bitmap images is that you can place images over the top of each other and you will be able to see the image underneither. An example of mthis is when the background is coloured and you place an image over it if it is in vector format then the background will show through around the edge of the picture but in a bitmap format the pixels would stop the colour being around the edges as they are restricted to a rectangular shape.

The main problem users face when using vector images is that due to the lack of detail enabled you are not able to make things look realistic be cause they are made up of solid colours whereas photos are made up of gradients of colour that add shadows and depth to the picture. BUT vector images are becoming much better and advanced in technology so its only a matter of time before we are able to edit pictures professional with them without having a cartoon like image.

The things about vector images is that they are made up of matimatical number and such which is what allows you to rescale their size,  as they are more or less individual objects.

So overall with all the improvements that are being made to vector images it won’t be long before their able to do everything that a bitmap image can do and more.  The only problem that needs to be solved before a lot more people start using it is how to make it more detailed. Regardless at the moment both of these file formats have issues that limit what you are and are not able to edit on them.