Unit 5

Multimedia Authoring &

Compression

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Contents
• Examples of Multimedia
• Requirements for Multimedia Authoring Tools
• Intramedia Processing
• Intermedia Processing
• Media Compression
• Need for Graphics Compression
• Graphics compression in relation to other media
compression
• Mesh compression using connectivity encoding

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Multimedia examples
Following are some examples that are often encountered in daily life
Multimedia Communication: This is the type that we most often
encounter in everyday life because the main function of this type of
multimedia is a medium to publish various important information to
reach everyone.
Eg. Television,Radio,Internet,Film,Music,Game,Tutorial, Entertainment
Multimedia Content Production: The definition of multimedia content
production is a type of multimedia that uses several different
components, such as text, animation, audio, video, and images that
are combined to produce multimedia content products such as :
Music, Game, Entertainment

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

Examples of Multimedia

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Examples of Multimedia
1. Websites and Webpages: incorporate text, images, videos, animations, and audio to provide an
interactive and informative experience for users.
2. Online Videos: videos combine visuals, audio, and sometimes text to entertain, educate, or inform
viewers on different topics. For eg: Youtube, Vimeo
3. Interactive E-Books: digital publications include not only text but also images, audio, and video
which provide a more immersive reading experience.
4. Video Games: combine graphics, and audio, and often incorporate storytelling to create immersive
and engaging experiences for players.
5. Educational Software: educational software to make learning more engaging and effective.
Interactive lessons often include videos, animations, and quizzes to help students understand
complex concepts.
6. Podcasts: allows content creators to share information, stories, and discussions through spoken
word and sometimes music or sound effects.
7. Virtual Reality (VR): combines visuals, audio, and sometimes haptic feedback to create realistic
experiences
8. Digital Art: often combine elements like graphics, animations, and music to convey emotions and
messages.
9. Social Media Posts: incorporate multimedia elements such as images, videos, and gifs to enable
users to share their stories and experiences. For eg, Instagram and Facebook
10. Advertising and Marketing: Commercials, banner ads, and interactive promotions combine
different media elements to understand consumers’ attention and convey brand messages
effectively.
Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil
Requirement for Multimedia Authoring Tools
• Multimedia authoring is a process of assembling different
types of media contents like text, audio, image,
animations and video as a single stream of information
with the help of various software tools available.
• Common tasks to all multimedia authoring processes can
be enumerated as follows:
– Creating, editing, and making the individual media items that
make up the presentation production ready
– Assembling the items into a coherent presentation, including
the specification of the temporal and spatial layout of the
media elements
– Specifying the interaction between the media elements, which
often amounts to also delineating the flow of content as a
viewer interacts with the presentation
Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil
• In short,

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Types of Authoring Tools

• Card or Page based authoring tools

• Icon based or Event driven authoring tools
• Time based authoring tools

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Card or Page based authoring tools
• In these authoring systems, elements are organized as pages of a book or
a stack of cards.
• These tools are best used when the bulk of your content consists of
elements that can be viewed individually, for example the pages of a
book or file cards in card file.
• You can jump from page to page because all pages can be interrelated.
• In the authoring system you can organize pages or cards in the sequences
manner. Every page of the book may contain many media elements like
sounds, videos and animations.
• One page may have a hyperlink to another page that comes at a much
later stage and by clicking on the same you might have effectively
skipped several pages in between.
• Some examples of card or page tools are:
– Hypercard (Mac)
– Tool book (Windows)
– PowerPoint (Windows)
– Supercard (Mac)

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Card or Page based authoring tools
Advantages
– Easy to understand.
– One screen is equal to one card or one page.
– Easy to use as these tools provide template.
– Short development time.
Disadvantages
– Some run only on one platform.
– Tools are not as powerful as equivalent stand-alones.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Icon based or Event driven authoring tools
• Icon-based tools give a visual programming approach to organizing and
presenting multimedia.
• First you build a structure or flowchart of events, tasks and decisions by
dragging appropriate icons from a library.
• Each icon does a specific task, for example- plays a sound, open an image
etc.
• The flowchart graphically displays the project's logic. When the structure is
built you can add your content text, graphics, animation, video movies and
sounds.
• A nontechnical multimedia author can also build sophisticated applications
without scripting using icon based authoring tools.
• Some examples of icon based tools are:
- Authorware Professional (Mac/Windows)
- Icon Author (Windows)

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

Icon based or Event driven authoring tools
Advantages:
• Clear Structure.
• Easy editing and updating

Disadvantages:
• Difficult to learn.
• Expensive.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Time based authoring tools
• Time based authoring tools allow the designer to arrange various
elements and events of the multimedia project along a well defined time
line.
• As the time advances from starting point of the project, the events begin
to occur, one after another.
• The events may include media files playback as well as transition from one
portion of the project to another.
• The speed at which these transitions occur can also be accurately
controlled.
• These tools are best to use for those projects, wherein the information
flow can be directed from beginning to end much like the movies.
• Some example of Time based tools are:
- Macromedia's Director
- Macromedia Flash

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Time based authoring tools
Advantages
• Good for creating animation.
• Branching, user control, interactivity facilities.

Disadvantages
• Expensive
• Large file size
• Steep learning curve to understand various features.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Intramedia Processing -Intra means within a single place or thing
• The intramedia issues deal with processing an individual media type.
• Intramedia processing depends on the media type and typically makes use of dedicated
software related to that media.
• This is a necessary step because most often the captured media, such as images and
videos, need to be edited or formatted.
• For example,
• Video captured often has undesirable parts that need to be edited out, parts where
color and contrast need to be enhanced. Such specific video-related aspects are
performed in a dedicated video editing tool such as Adobe Premiere or Apple Final
Cut Pro.
• Digital images captured via a digital camera might need to be cropped, resized,
sharpened, filtered, and saved in other formats for use in a multimedia production.
Adobe Photoshop is the software of choice for editing images.
• Similarly, Autodesk Maya or 3ds Max is used to create 2D/3D graphics and
animation content.
• Adobe Audition is a good software tool used to edit and clean audio data.
All these examples show the need for captured media data to be transformed before it
can be used in a presentation as is, or combined with other media elements. In general, a
variety of commercial media software tools are used for the editing of individual media
types.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Intermedia Processing -Inter means between two or more things
• Once the individual media types are available and production ready, they are brought
into a multimedia-authoring tool.
• Here, all the individual media elements are assembled together to form a production.
• All authoring tools and processes ultimately publish the content in a specific format for
viewing in a specific type of multimedia player.
• These formats and players might be based on proprietary technology or collective
industry-determined standards. Proprietary formats and players include Adobe Flash
Player, Windows Media Player, Viewpoint Experience Technology, or even interactive
2D/3D game engines, such as Quake, Nintendo platforms, and SONY PlayStations.
• Standards-based multimedia formats and players include DVD players and MPEG-4
players. The authoring tools that support exporting to these formats include commercial
tools, such as Macromedia Director, DVD Studio Pro, Tribework iShell, iVAST iAuthor and
iEncode, and so on.
• It is impractical to create a single authoring tool that will universally fulfill the needs of
all the multimedia content and applications for various platforms used in different
markets, for example, Web-based advertising, entertainment, gaming, education,
enterprise. Every authoring tool is designed to serve a specific market and platform,
and, hence, has specialized workflows and capabilities

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Need of Media Compression
• The amount of digital media data that is produced in the form of text, video,
audio, 3D graphics, and combinations of these media types is extraordinarily
large, and the rate of creation increases every day.
• This growing mass of data needs to be stored, accessed, and delivered to a
multitude of clients over digital networks, which have varying bandwidths.
• The need to compress media data is motivated by both storage requirements
and transmission requirements.
• In earlier days of the information age, disk space was limited and expensive,
and bandwidth was limited, so compression was a must.
• Today, inexpensive storage in a variety of forms is readily available, and high-
bandwidth connections (DSL, fiber optics and T-1) are becoming more popular.
• However, the amount and type of information we consume has also increased
many fold, with the use of images, audio, video, and graphical animations.
Furthermore, modern applications, such as high definition video, require even
larger bandwidths.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Media Compression
• The two concepts of storage and transmission of data might seem like two
different areas, but the data economics are the same. Each bit, whether stored
or transmitted, has a cost associated with it.
• Compression of media is, therefore, a necessity to make many applications
work with respect to storage and networked delivery.
• To compress multimedia data, we look at data as containing information.
• Compression can be considered as a science that reduces the amount of data
used to convey the same information.
• It relies on the fact that information, such as an image or video, is not a random
collection of pixels but exhibits order and patterns. If this coherence can be
understood or even modeled, the information can often be represented and
stored/transmitted with a lesser amount of data.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Compression Techniques
There are TWO data compression techniques
Lossless compression techniques and Lossy compression techniques.
• In Lossless compression, as the name suggests, results in a
compressed signal, which produces the exact original signal when
decompressed.
• In lossy compression, the compressed signal when decompressed
does not correspond to the original signal. Lossy compression
produces distortions between the original and the decompressed
signal.
• Both techniques can be used separately, or in a combined manner
for various applications and have resulted in a variety of standards
used to compress text, images, video, audio, and so on.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Graphics compression in relation to other media compression

• Graphics compression is a relatively new field compared with

the other media types, such as image, video, and audio
compression.
• Less attention has been devoted to 3D object and shape
compression from research, industry, and standardization
efforts, until recently when usage and complexities of 3D
objects has grown in a variety of industries.
• All standard graphics processing is defined on triangulated
meshes.
• To compress information in 3D meshes, it is important to
recognize what constitutes information in the case of a mesh
and, thereby understand what the redundancy here is.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

Triangular Mesh (a triangle mesh is a type of polygon mesh)
• A bunch of triangles in 3D space that are connected together
to form a surface
• • Geometrically, a mesh is a piecewise planar surface
– almost everywhere, it is planar
– exceptions are at the edges where triangles join
• It’s a piecewise planar approximation of a smooth surface

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Mesh compression using connectivity encoding

• A triangular mesh is represented by a set of mesh points and

their interconnectivity.
• The mesh points are represented as 3D (x, y, z) positions and
the interconnectivity is specified by edges.
• In such representations, the information is contained in the
positions and the interconnectivity.
• Positional information is represented by a fixed number of bits
for each x, y, z coordinate for each vertex.
• The connectivity information in a triangular mesh is
represented by three indices per triangle and can be
substantial depending on the number of triangles in the mesh.
• Connectivity-encoding techniques aim mainly to reduce the
redundancy in connectivity information.

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil

 Thank you

Computer Graphics & Multimedia By Prof. Meenakshi P. Patil