Video for multimedia

Video in the early 1990s suffered from both high cost and low quality. The new news is that you and your students can now create outstanding-quality video using a camcorder and a video capture card that costs from $150 to $1,000, or you can opt to create low-quality video using a $60 camera that needs no video capture card at all. Excellent-quality video is suitable for delivery over a local area network or one of the 4 high-speed Internet connections that we just happen to have discussed above. Low-quality video takes full advantage of the 56 Kbps Internet connections that most people use today. You can see a sample of what is possible with a $60 camcorder at the Web site, http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangl... Click on video with Real ProducerG2.

Now first, a word about video quality. Even tags in stores measure it in lines of horizontal resolution (LOHR), although most people have no idea what that means. (It is not the number of scan lines.) If you care, see "Distributed Multimedia," pp. 37-38 (Agnew, Palmer W. and Kellerman, Anne, Distributed Multimedia, 1996Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-76536-5.) otherwise just note that more LOHR is better. Web-page video is lucky if it has as many as 160 LOHR. VHS or 8 mm camcorders or video cassette recorders (VCRs) produce about 240 LOHR. Broadcast television is about 330 LOHR. DVC or Digital 8 camcorders (and also movies on Digital Versatile Discs, DVDs) are up to 500 LOHR.

Most amazingly, a small but powerful video camera costs about $60, including the compression chip. (It contains no recorder, so it is not a camcorder.) This is how the low-quality video solution works: the camera never converts its video to analog form, it just compresses its digital video and sends that to a PC, using either a Universal Serial Bus (USB) or a parallel port connection. Intel's Create and Share Camera Pack and Logitech's QuickCam Pro are examples of such WebCam products. Having 2 cameras, one on each end of an Internet session, allows real-time videoconferences. One camera suffices for creating video that you can post on a Web page. See http://www.intel.com/pccamera or http://www.logitech.com/cf/products/prod...

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