Dreamweavers Blog

Videos are used in a lot of different kinds of interactive media. its used on the Internet and emails on interactive CD and DVD Roms and even on mobile devices and they are used for a huge variety of reasons such as education and promotion.

Internet - user generated content and short films

The biggest use of video interactive media i think is the Internet as there are many ways it can be used to include interactive media (eg. PCs, PS3's, XBOX360's PDA's and other mobile devices such as mobile phones). I think YouTube would be the best example of this, they have a huge collection of user generated content that can be accessed by anyone and uploaded by anyone too. YouTube is also a great place to find short films as they allow their videos to be anything up to 10 minutes long. sometimes if the short film is longer than 10 minutes the user will upload it in two parts this makes it very easy for the films to be released into a large audience.
Example.




People and companies can upload a variety of different video formats to YouTube such as AVI, MPEG and FLV. The videos are then played in flash player, this might not be ideal especially since not everybody has flash player installed onto their computers so they might not be able to view the videos. To solve this problem YouTube could offer options to select different players to benefit those who don't have flash player but have other players. This is a good place for people to upload videos who want to share them with the world and receive comments from the general public, from a wide audience.

Another kind of video that is often mainly found on the Internet is promotional materials such as film trailers (http://www.sweeneytoddmovie.com/) i think this site has very good examples of video used in interactive media such as the "cut your own trailer" bit that allows you to put together the movie trailer yourself by inserting video clips into the order that you like. and allowing you to view it, it also has the promotional trailers on there which are in the form of an applet, this allows you to control the playback of the trailers (eg. fast forward, rewind, stop, play and pause) These again are usually Flash based.

Internet - Advertisment
Adverts are found all over the Internet sometimes as pop ups and sometimes just banners on the side of web pages. hey often use video in them to make them attract the viewers attention they are often interactive as they ask you to do things like swat the fly with the swat or things like that, this often links you to another web page they are probably doing using Flash.

You can send videos via email attachments this is done by having the video file stored on your computer then uploading it to the email as an attachment, then the user that the email is being sent to receives it and downloads it to their computer to watch it in a suitable player. Its interactive as you can control the playback of the videos in this too. This method is a good way of spreading viral marketing as when a user sees the video in question this offers them an easy way of sharing it with their friends. Another way things like this can be sent through emails is via hyperlinks which direct the receiver to the web page the sender has hyperlinked them to. the file types arent limited in the form by the email itself the only thing that limits users from sharing videos is that the person who is recieving the file needs to have the relevent player to veiw the video format being sent.

Presentations - PowerPoint
You can include videos in presentations such as PowerPoint presentations where you link the video from your hard drive into the presentation usually in an .avi format. this allows the video to play at a certain pre planned time. this would be useful say for architects who are presenting their ideas for a certain build and have a virtual tour of their planned building such as this one.


its originally interactive as you could select where in the building it would take you and what rendering options you wanted but this is only a video of the tour in action.

CD and DVD Rom's can be used for educational interactive media and video is often used in these to help the child understand whats going on and what they need to do. an example of this can be found on learning Cd's and DVDs.


this video shows a little bit of how video has been Incorporated to help learning. the people are videos and they ask questions and you have to answer them by selecting the right answers with your mouse and by typing answers too, the response is programmed depending on what input you put in. so it will show the clip recorded for you getting the right answer if you put the right answer in or a clip for the wrong answer if you put in a wrong answer. These could be flash based or even .AVI or MPEG files.

Another use of video in interactive media on DVD is on the DVD menus, they often have videos playing in the background behind the title and menu buttons sometimes the video is changed when a different menu is highlighted. this normally gives the viewers a preview of whats in the film.


Games - Cut Scene
Games often have videos Incorporated into them too as cut scenes. so the when the user gets to a certain point they unlock a cut scene which will help explain the story a little more or give away the location of a valued item. the videos them selves are rarely interactive although you can skip them some times.

Mobile devices such as the iPhone have video recording functions and video playback options too, these are interactive to the same amount as other forms of video playback such as fast forward, rewind, pause, play and stop. the iPhones use quick time to play their videos as quick time is the player made by apple. where as in phones such as some nokia phones the program used for video play back is Real Player still having the same interactive functions.

Comepression is used to make files sizes smaller. this is done by reducing the amount of data stored in the file. When a video file, decompression takes areas (called macroblocks) of each frame and compares it to the frames before and after and removes the areas that dont change much. this then helps to decrease the amount of space and memory used in saving the file.

File Formats:
.Mpeg: This was created by ISO to standardise audio and video compression transmission. It was designed to make a standard that could be used by a lot of users.

.Mov: This was created by apple for use by the program quicktime. Again it was used to create a standard that would be widely available mainly for people with Apple Mac computers but has also spread to Windows users

.Avi: This was created by Microsoft for windows users. The format is able to be played on many other players which allows it to be more widely used.

Streaming is designed to allow media files to be played while being transfered. this is normally done over the internet to stream videos such as on BBCiplayer. This allows veiwers to watch programs much quicker as they dont have to wait for a complete download to complete before they can watch the program. It also helps companies to control the level of copywrite infringements as it doesnt require the person to download the file to the harddrive where it can be copied and illegally distributed.

A data transfer rate is the amount of data that can be transfered. Its important to think about when streaming as it effects teh way the video plays back. if the DTR isnt high enough then the video will jump during play back and it has to pause to buffer the video. Its effected by the bandwidth available to the user and the bandwitdth availble to the server, also it can be effected by too many people connected to the server at the time.

Frame rates are described in frames per second or fps. It describes how many frames are player per second. the more frames used the smoother the playback would be, industry standard for a PAL video is 25 fps. where as an NTSC video the frame rate is 29.9 fps.

Screen resolution refers to the number of pixels in the hight and width dimentions that the video is played in.

The file size is the size of the video. This is effected by things such as resolution, compression and duration. The lower these things are the smaller the file size will be.

4:3: This is the ratio of a standard tv screen. It determines the proportion of height to width.

16:9: This is the ratio of widescreen tv. That means when filming at this ratio they should put the important parts of the film in the "title safe" area so if the film is played on a standard ratio (4:3) none of the important information (ie. text, imagery) is lost off screen.

DVD players are designed to take DVDs but they can also take CD roms. DVD films are normally MPEG2 files as this is the industry standard. some dvd players will allow you to burn your own dvds which will be compatible with other dvd players

Flash player is required to play flash videos. These are commonly used in web browser based videos such as youtube. this is a disadvtange to anyone who doesnt have the player. The native file extention for flash is .FLV

Real:
Real player was created originally for just audio files. It can open most file extentions such as quicktime and windows media formats but also has its own native .RA, .RM, .RV, .RMVB extentions. Also this was one of the first programs created that allowed streaming of media via the internet.