MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION
 Module 7 - Introduction to digital video
Contents:

Moving video images on your television screen represent vast amounts of data and information.  In fact, if you were to record and play back all of the information from a video tape onto a computer’s hard drive, it would need to process over 30 megabytes of information every second!  You would need a very fast computer and huge hard drives to store and process these vast amounts of information.  Obviously this is not the answer.

In order to bring video images into a multimedia program, hardware and software is required to digitize or capture, compress and process the video information.  Making the video images smaller, giving them fewer colours and using a slower frame rate will make the video file small and manageable enough to be played back on most computers.

If you have a video capture card on your computer, it is very easy to digitize in Hyperstudio. The interface is easy to use and very similar to the one you used for capturing audio.

There is a separate course available through Shaw Multimedia on producing digital video. For example, click here to learn how to embed a Quicktime movie in a Web page.
 
For more information, visit this site for a comprehensive guide to understanding and working with video, courtesy of Hypertech Multimedia.

Michael Shaw, 1997