Katrin Becker

(My Page)

EDER 679.12
Reading Response 7

Computer Based Learning II

Dr. Jacobsen's Course Main Page

Week 7 March 3

Video / Multimedia Field  Study at Learning Commons

Presenter: Mike Mattson, Learning Commons

Assigned Readings

1

Additional References

1

Chapman, Nigel & Jenny, Digital Multimedia, 2000 John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0-471-98386-1

- excellent resource - explains many forms of mutlimedia WebSite: http://www.wiley.com/digital_multimedia

Response

One of the first problems is that the video clips offered for our use are stored without suffixes on their names. We are told they are Quicktime, but we are not given enough data to actually do anything with them. They cannot be read by my current versions of QuickTime or the Windows Media Player.

Turns out, video is not really expensive, or difficult, at least it doesn't need to be. The changes to our hardware capabilities, and to how people use the internet over the past five years makes many of the judgements in this text out of date. While download times are still an issue and should not be ignored, animation and video are no longer the domain of the 'experts'.

It might be nice to know where the different forms of video are used. For example, component video is used in production and post-production; composite is used for transmission; and S-video is often used in amateur and semi-professional equipment as well as for consumer purposes, like VHS tapes. Nice pictures though.

The description of lossy vs. lossless compression is misleading. The implication that the lossy methods necessarily affect quality while lossless do not cannot be supported. It really isn't very complicated at this level - compression works in one of two ways: either we remove redundancy to make the file smaller (lossless), or we actually remove data (lossy). Lossy compression always results in loss of information, but does not necessarily result in a perceived loss of quality.

All in although this chapter provides a fairly general overview of video - it is nice as an introduction. I liked the examples, and the VR stuff is cute - I've never seen that before.

Copyright (C) 2004 Katrin Becker