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What is Multimedia?
Multimedia is a term that was coined by the advertising
industry to mean buying ads on TV, radio, outdoor and print media. It was
originally picked up by the PC industry to mean a computer that could
display text in 16 colors and had a sound card. The term was a joke when you
compared the PC to the Apple Macintosh which was truly a multimedia machine
that could show color movies with sound and lifelike still images.
When Windows reached about version 3, and Intel was
making the 386, the SoundBlaster equipped PC was beginning to approach the
Mac in sound capabilities it but still had a long way to go as far as video.
The Pentium processor, VGA graphics and Windows 95 nearly closed the gap
with the Mac and today's with fast Pentiums, new high definition monitors
and blazing fast video cards the PC has caught up with the Mac and
outperforms television.
There are a number of terrific software packages that
allow you to create multimedia presentations on your computer. Perhaps the
best and most widely known is Microsoft's PowerPoint. With PowerPoint a user
can mix text with pictures, sound and movies to produce a multimedia
slideshow that's great for boardroom presentations or a computer kiosk but
difficult to distribute.
Eventually, in the not too distant future, the digital
movie imbedded in web pages will become the presentation delivery system of
choice relegating PowerPoint to the dustbins of software. If you have ever
browsed a DVD movie disk on your computer you've seen that future.
The basic elements of multimedia on a computer are:
- Text
- Still images
- Sound
- Movies
- Animations
- Special Effects
Text, still images and the video portion of movies are
functions of your monitor, your video card and the software driver that
tells Windows how your video card works. Your monitor is essentially a grid
of closely spaced little luminous points called pixels which can be turned
on and off like tiny light bulbs. For the sake of simplicity we'll extend
our above example to say that the little bulbs can be lighted with a number
of colors. Just how close together those points of light are packed is a
function of your monitor. The number of colors that the luminescent points
can display is a function of the monitor in concert with the video card. (If
you're wondering what a video card is, follow the cable from your monitor to
your computer.)
Let's take each element of multimedia apart and see
what makes it tick.
Lesson 1 Text
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