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Understanding the Media in Multimedia

© Anne Kellerman

It is helpful when thinking about multimedia to realize that it is composed of five media (text, graphics, images, audio, and video) connected together by controls or navigation or hyperlinks. The goal of any multimedia creation is to tell an interesting, compelling and intriguing story. The story may be fiction or non-fiction, depending on the application. In the table below, we organize the five media to show how a multimedia author could input and output the various media. We divide input to handle two forms of each medium - its natural form and its synthetic form. We create synthetic forms directly on a computer, usually using some multimedia tool.

Video is the digital medium that shows you a rapid sequence of still pictures and gives you the illusion of seeing a picture that moves. Animation is the synthetic form of video that we create using a tool such as Autodesk's 3D Studio MAX, whereas we capture natural video by starting with analog video and converting it to digital video.

Graphics consist of objects, such as the lines and shaded rectangles that make up an organization chart. As different ASCII codes distinguish "A" from "b" or "Q" in text, different codes distinguish a circle from a line or rectangle in graphics. Additional graphics codes store information about an object. For a circle, the codes would be likely to store the x and y coordinates of its center, the length of its radius, its thickness, its color, and the color, if any, that fills it.

An image represents a still picture in digital form by using bits to specify the color of each of many pixels. A multimedia author can either synthesize an image by using a "paint" program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or capture a preexisting image by using a scanner.

Especially when creating pictures for the Web, it is important to understand the difference between graphics and images. Graphics use up less storage space and less network transmission time than images. This is good for both developers and users. There are unique multimedia tools that you can use to create graphics. If you can get away with these tools, then you will save space. Images generally take up more space and time. However, to tell your story, you often need to use images and work with image tools.

The medium that we call audio is sound expressed in digital form. Natural sound, which may include speech, music, and sound effects, consists of a continuously varying air pressure that might wiggle your ear drums and cause you to hear the sound. The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) audio standard provides a way to record music without sampling air pressure thousands of times per second. Just as you create text by typing on a computer keyboard, you create MIDI audio by playing a specially equipped musical keyboard instrument that you connected to a computer. However, whereas text records only which keys you press, MIDI records the times when you press and release a key and may also record how forcibly you press a key and how rapidly you release a key. MIDI records any other actions you take as well, such as changing the musical voice from French horn to violin or calling for reverberation to simulate reflections inside a concert hall. MIDI generally takes up less space to store than digitizing natural audio and saving it as a wav file. However, just as graphics can't always do a good job of what has to be an image, MIDI cannot be used for voices.

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