Video Arcade Games & Controls

Have a swiss army knife of tools available to tackle all sorts of tasks:

• Sound

• Image

• Video - Movie clips, DVDs

  • Interleaving - synchronizing the audio with the video.

  • QuickTime - Can mix various forms of data together. Such as titles, multi track files, etc. You can add various features, like 3D, etc, to your multimedia files. It has a Media Abstraction Layer that explains to the computer how to access the media elements contained inside of it.

  • AVI - not as flexible as QuickTime.

  • Compressing Movies will be covered when we get to video later on in the term.

• Screen Capture

• File Conversion

Word Processors - Edit multimedia documents

Presentation Packages - produce multimedia shows consisting of slides, audio clips, animations, movies, etc. Powerpoint is one such package.

Hypermedia Programs - go beyond linear slide-shows and allow the user to navigate through them. Hypercard is one such program. It allows for various screens (cards) and you can stack the cards in various orders and link them. Hyperstudio is a program that allows students to link various media files to make multimedia projects.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)- turns printed text to electronic text.

Paint & Drawing Tools

• 3D Modeling software - Sketchup from Google

• Photoshop (bitmaps)

• Fireworks (vectors or bitmaps)

• Anti-Aliasing

• Plugins

Image editors typically allow you to import a photo from a camera, scanner, etc.
They also allow you to have plugins to enhance the features. Such as a special effects plugin.

Authoring Systems - allow you to evaluate input from the user, branch in your program according, and allow for a wider range of user interaction are called authoring systems. They typically have a flow chart showing the organization of the program.

Web Page Creation - Dreamweaver, Front Page, and other programs allow you to create web pages by using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)

Types of Authoring Tools

• Card or page based - like an interactive book.

• Icon Based, event driven - Menu with various choices based on events. Like a flow chart of conditions (IF-THEN)

• Time based and presention tools - Timeline for events to occure. Also allow for interactivity. Flash & Director such an examples.

• Object Based - do things based on messages. Allow for properties to be assigned to them.

Stages of Authoring:

• Analysis - find out what to do
  

• Design - storyboard
  

• Developement - prototype
  

• Evaluation - test and fine tune
  

• Distribution - Finally done
  

Adding media content to your projects:

If you add a media file to a project and make a change to the original media file. What happens to your project?

Sharing data amongst applications:

DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) lets you have a piece of data shared by many applications. Updating on occurence can update all occurences.

• Hot link - modifications across documents

• Cold link - modifications local to each document

OLE (Object Linking & Embedding)

• Embeding - part of

• Linking - pointer

Advanced Programming Instructions (API) that is
commonly referred to as the Multimedia Control Interface (MCI) is used to control media file content in an application.

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