CHAPTER TWELVE: BASIC TOOLS FOR MULTIMEDIA

OBJECTS

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this chapter the learner shall be able to;

i. identify software for creating multimedia objects

ii. Locate software used for editing multimedia objects

iii. understand different video file formats

12.1 Introduction
The basic tools set for building multimedia project contains one or more authoring systems and
various editing applications for text, images, sound, and motion video. A few additional
applications are also useful for capturing images from the screen, translating file formats and
tools for the making multimedia production easier.

12.2 Text Editing and Word Processing Tools

A word processor is usually the first software tool computer users rely upon for creating text.
The word processor is often bundled with an office suite. Word processors such as Microsoft
Word and WordPerfect are powerful applications that include spellcheckers, table formatters,
thesauruses and prebuilt templates for letters, resumes, purchase orders and other common
documents.

12.3 OCR Software

Often there will be multimedia content and other text to incorporate into a multimedia project,
but no electronic text file. With optical character recognition (OCR) software, a flat-bed scanner,
and a computer, it is possible to save many hours of rekeying printed words, and get the job done
faster and more accurately than a roomful of typists.
OCR software turns bitmapped characters into electronically recognizable ASCII text. A scanner
is typically used to create the bitmap. Then the software breaks the bitmap into chunks according
to whether it contains text or graphics, by examining the texture and density of areas of the
bitmap and by detecting edges. The text areas of the image are then converted to ASCII character
using probability and expert system algorithms.

12.4 Image-Editing Tools

Image-editing application is specialized and powerful tools for enhancing and retouching
existing bitmapped images. These applications also provide many of the feature and tools of
painting and drawing programs and can be used to create images from scratch as well as images
digitized from scanners, video frame-grabbers, digital cameras, clip art files, or original artwork
files created with a painting or drawing package. Here are some features typical of image-editing
applications and of interest to multimedia developers:

 Multiple windows that provide views of more than one image at a time

 Conversion of major image-data types and industry-standard file formats

 Direct inputs of images from scanner and video sources

 Employment of a virtual memory scheme that uses hard disk space as RAM for images
that require large amounts of memory

 Capable selection tools, such as rectangles, lassos, and magic wands, to select ortions of a
bitmap

 Image and balance controls for brightness, contrast, and color balance

 Good masking features

 Multiple undo and restore features

 Anti-aliasing capability, and sharpening and smoothing controls

 Color-mapping controls for precise adjustment of color balance

 Tools for retouching, blurring, sharpening, lightening, darkening, smudging, and tinting

 Geometric transformation such as flip, skew, rotate, and distort and perspective changes

 Ability to resample and resize an image

  134-bit color, 8- or 4-bit indexed color, 8-bit gray-scale, black-and-white and
customizable color palettes

 Ability to create images from scratch, using line, rectangle, square, circle, ellipse,
polygon, airbrush, paintbrush, pencil, and eraser tools, with customizable brush shapes
and user-definable bucket and gradient fills

 Multiple typefaces, styles, and sizes, and type manipulation and masking routines
 Filters for special effects, such as crystallize, dry brush, emboss, facet, fresco, graphic
pen, mosaic, pixelize, poster, ripple, smooth, splatter, stucco, twirl, watercolor, wave, and
wind

 Support for third-party special effect plug-ins

 Ability to design in layers that can be combined, hidden, and reordered

Plug-Ins
Image-editing programs usually support powerful plug-in modules available from third-party
developers that allow to wrap, twist, shadow, cut, diffuse, and otherwise “filter” your images for
special visual effects.

12.5 Painting and Drawing Tools

Painting and drawing tools, as well as 3-D modelers, are perhaps the most important items in the
toolkit because, of all the multimedia elements, the graphical impact of the project will likely
have the greatest influence on the end user. If the artwork is amateurish, or flat and uninteresting,
both the creator and the users will be disappointed. Painting software, such as Photoshop,
Fireworks, and Painter, is dedicated to producing crafted bitmap images. Drawing software, such
as CorelDraw, FreeHand, Illustrator, Designer, and Canvas, is dedicated to producing vector-
based line art easily printed to paper at high resolution.
Some software applications combine drawing and painting capabilities, but many authoring
systems can import only bitmapped images. Typically, bitmapped images provide the greatest
choice and power to the artist for rendering fine detail and effects, and today bitmaps are used in
multimedia more often than drawn objects. Some vector based packages such as Macromedia’s
Flash are aimed at reducing file download times on the Web, and may contain both bitmaps and
drawn art. The anti-aliased character shown in the bitmap of Color Plate 5 is an example of the
fine touches that improve the look of an image.
Look for these features in a drawing or painting packages:
 An intuitive graphical user interface with pull-down menus, status bars, palette control,
and dialog boxes for quick, logical selection

 Scalable dimensions, so you can resize, stretch, and distort both large and small bitmaps
 Paint tools to create geometric shapes, from squares to circles and from curves to
complex polygons

 Ability to pour a color, pattern, or gradient into any area

 Ability to paint with patterns and clip art

 Customizable pen and brush shapes and sizes

 Eyedropper tool that samples colors

 Auto trace tool that turns bitmap shapes into vector-based outlines

 Support for scalable text fonts and drop shadows

 Multiple undo capabilities, to let you try again

 Painting features such as smoothing coarse-edged objects into the background with anti-
aliasing, airbrushing in variable sizes, shapes, densities, and patterns; washing colors in
gradients; blending; and masking

 Support for third-party special effect plug-ins

 Object and layering capabilities that allow you to treat separate elements independently

 Zooming, for magnified pixel editing

 All common color depths: 1-, 4-, 8-, and 16-, 134-, or 313- bit color, and grayscale

 Good color management and dithering capability among color depths using various color
models such as RGB, HSB, and CMYK

 Good palette management when in 8-bit mode

 Good file importing and exporting capability for image formats such as PIC, GIF, TGA,
TIF, WMF, JPG, PCX, EPS, PTN, and BMP
12.6 Sound Editing Tools
Sound editing tools for both digitized and MIDI sound lets hear music as well as create it. By
drawing a representation of a sound in fine increments, whether a score or a waveform, it is
possible to cut, copy, paste and otherwise edit segments of it with great precision. System sounds
are shipped both Macintosh and Windows systems and they are available as soon the Operating
system is installed. For MIDI sound, a MIDI synthesizer is required to play and record sounds
from musical instruments. For ordinary sound there are varieties of software such as Soundedit,
MP3cutter, Wavestudio.

12.7 Animation, Video and Digital Movie Tools

Animation and digital movies are sequences of bitmapped graphic scenes (frames, rapidly played
back. Most authoring tools adapt either a frame or object oriented approach to animation.
Moviemaking tools typically take advantage of Quicktime for Macintosh and Microsoft Video
for Windows and lets the content developer to create, edit and present digitized motion video
segments.

12.7.1 Video formats

A video format describes how one device sends video pictures to another device, such as the
way that a DVD player sends pictures to a television or a computer to a monitor. More formally,
the video format describes the sequence and structure of frames that create the moving video
image. Video formats are commonly known in the domain of commercial broadcast and
consumer devices; most notably to date, these are the analog video formats of NTSC, PAL, and
SECAM. However, video formats also describe the digital equivalents of the commercial
formats, the aging custom military uses of analog video (such as RS-170 and RS-343), the
increasingly important video formats used with computers, and even such offbeat formats such
as color field sequential.

Video formats were originally designed for display devices such as CRTs. However, because
other kinds of displays have common source material and because video formats enjoy wide
adoption and have convenient organization, video formats are a common means to describe the
structure of displayed visual information for a variety of graphical output devices.
12.7.2 Common organization of video formats
A video format describes a rectangular image carried within an envelope containing information
about the image. Although video formats vary greatly in organization, there is a common
taxonomy:
 A frame can consist of two or more fields, sent sequentially, that are displayed over time
to form a complete frame. This kind of assembly is known as interlace. An interlaced
video frame is distinguished from a progressive scan frame, where the entire frame is sent
as a single intact entity.

 A frame consists of a series of lines, known as scan lines. Scan lines have a regular and
consistent length in order to produce a rectangular image. This is because in analog
formats, a line lasts for a given period of time; in digital formats, the line consists of a
given number of pixels. When a device sends a frame, the video format specifies that
devices send each line independently from any others and that all lines are sent in top-to-
bottom order.

 As above, a frame may be split into fields – odd and even (by line “numbers”) or upper
and lower, respectively. In NTSC, the lower field comes first, then the upper field, and
that’s the whole frame. The basics of a format are Aspect Ratio, Frame Rate, and
Interlacing with field order if applicable: Video formats use a sequence of frames in a
specified order. In some formats, a single frame is independent of any other (such as
those used in computer video formats), so the sequence is only one frame. In other video
formats, frames have an ordered position. Individual frames within a sequence typically
have similar construction.

However, depending on its position in the sequence, frames may vary small elements within
them to represent additional information. For example, MPEG-13 compression may eliminate
the information that is redundant frame-to-frame in order to reduce the data size, preserving the
information relating to changes between frames.

Analog video formats

 NTSC
 PAL
  SECAM
Digital Video Formats
These are MPEG13 based terrestrial broadcast video formats
 ATSC Standards
 DVB
 ISDB
These are strictly the format of the video itself, and not for the modulation used for transmission.

QuickTime
QuickTime is a multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc. capable of handling various
formats of digital video, media clips, sound, text, animation, music, and several types of
interactive panoramic images. Available for Classic Mac OS, Mac OS X and Microsoft
Windows operating systems, it provides essential support for software packages including
iTunes, QuickTime Player (which can also serve as a helper application for web browsers to play
media files that might otherwise fail to open) and Safari.
The QuickTime technology consists of the following:

1. The QuickTime Player application created by Apple, which is a media player.

2. The QuickTime framework, which provides a common set of APIs for encoding and
decoding audio and video.
3. The QuickTime Movie (.mov) file format, an openly-documented media container.
QuickTime is integral to Mac OS X, as it was with earlier versions of Mac OS. All Apple
systems ship with QuickTime already installed, as it represents the core media framework for
Mac OS X. QuickTime is optional for Windows systems, although many software applications
require it. Apple bundles it with each iTunes for Windows download, but it is also available as a
stand-alone installation.

QuickTime players
QuickTime is distributed free of charge, and includes the QuickTime Player application. Some
other free player applications that rely on the QuickTime framework provide features not
available in the basic QuickTime Player. For example:
 iTunes can export audio in WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless.
 In Mac OS X, a simple AppleScript can be used to play a movie in full-screen mode.
However, since version 7.13 the QuickTime Player now also supports for full screen
viewing in the non-pro version.

QuickTime framework
The QuickTime framework provides the following:
 Encoding and transcoding video and audio from one format to another.
 Decoding video and audio, and then sending the decoded stream to the graphics or audio
subsystem for playback. In Mac OS X, QuickTime sends video playback to the Quartz
Extreme (OpenGL) Compositor.
_ A plug-in architecture for supporting additional codecs (such as DivX). The framework
supports the following file types and codecs natively:

Audio
  Apple Lossless

 Audio Interchange (AIFF)

 Digital Audio: Audio CD – 16-bit (CDDA), 134-bit, 313-bit integer & floating point, and
64-bit floating point

 MIDI

 MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio (.mp3)

 MPEG-4 AAC Audio (.m4a, .m4b, .m4p)

 Sun AU Audio

 ULAW and ALAW Audio

 Waveform Audio (WAV)

Video
 3GPP & 3GPP13 file formats
 AVI file format

 Bitmap (BMP) codec and file format

 DV file (DV NTSC/PAL and DVC Pro NTSC/PAL codecs)

 Flash & FlashPix files

 GIF and Animated GIF files

 H.1361, H.1363, and H.1364 codecs

 JPEG, Photo JPEG, and JPEG-13000 codecs and file formats

 MPEG-1, MPEG-13, and MPEG-4 Video file formats and associated codecs (such as
AVC)

 QuickTime Movie (.mov) and QTVR movies

 Other video codecs: Apple Video, Cinepak, Component Video, Graphics, and Planar
RGB

 Other still image formats: PNG, TIFF, and TGA

Specification for QuickTime file format
The QuickTime (.mov) file format functions as a multimedia container file that contains one or
more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text (for
subtitles, for example). Other file formats that QuickTime supports natively (to varying degrees)
include AIFF, WAV, DV, MP3, and MPEG-1. With additional QuickTime Extensions, it can
also support Ogg, ASF, FLV, MKV, DivX Media Format, and others.

Chapter Review Questions

1. Discuss the uses of OCR software

2. Discuss the various video formats