Technical Issues

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England, Elaine and Finney, Andy (2002). Managing Multimedia: Project Management for Web and Convergent Media. Book 2: Technical Issues. Pearson Education Limited. England.
Quotes.

• Trimedia Production. It as become common for broadcasters to work with radio and television simultaneously and bi-media working has become commonplace, especially in news. The next step is to produce programming which can be used on radio, television and the Internet. The requirements and preferences of each are different. Radio has a relaxed intimacy rather like a companion person who hangs around chatting, while the Internet is responsive and can be directed like a servant. Television, on the other hand, rather takes over and sits you down and force-feeds you short extracts from the world outside. P57
• Video-on-demand (VOD) may provide another market for interactive services on the TV or via ADSL to a PC, and if so it will provide a potential market for multimedia developers for the navigation (more so than content which is probably pre-existing). The way in which VOD develops as a platform will depend on which of the two proposed models for it is used, and where. You can say that in one model the VOD server pushes the application for display in the home on a television linked to the service by a set-top box. In the other model the set-top box itself pulls the application from the server. P85
• Delivery medium P90
• Author once and deliver everywhere P96
• You might use only a small amount of video in an interactive application but its use can be very powerful and effective. One common form is known as a talking head. This is where all you see on the screen is a single person talking. If you have a famous presenter for your application than you might see him or her a few times like this. Even if most of the time you only hear the voice, it is nice to show your viewers what the face behind the voice looks like. P132
• The short hand for describing the amount of the speaker you can see in a shot is roughly like this:

1. Long shot –you can see the whole person and maybe enough of the surroundings to see where you are.
2. Mid-Shot –you can see most of the person speaking, including his or her hand
3. Medium close-up (MCU) –you can see the top of the person, from the middle of the chest upwards. This is sometimes called a head and shoulders shot and is the basic shot for an interview or statement to camera.
4. Close-up –you can see little more than the head.
5.Big close-up –very close (tight) on the head, cutting off the forehead. P136

• Video in multimedia is, by definition, digital. For practical reasons it also has to be compressed, because it is impractical to handle the high data rate used by raw video. P152
• Integration. Interactive media can be said to gather the best, and the worst, aspects of both computing and the audiovisual industry, and they have to be fused together in the core stage of multimedia development. This is the integration of the application, whether it is getting the parts of a website to work together or producing an iTV programme, a kiosk or a CD-ROM. P180

Alberto Ramirez Martinell