Hardware and Software
This blog will be aimed at first year multimedia computing students and people with a basic knowledge of multimedia. It should also help others who are looking to purchase some computer hardware or software.
There are many varieties of software and hardware required for the delivery of multimedia. Some of the multimedia equipment available includes scanners, projectors, video cameras, digital cameras, CD/DVD burners, and various types editing software such as Adobe Director and Flash.
Hardware
The flat scanner is the most common type of scanner. It can digitalise all types of documents, of different sizes (more often A4, but there also exists A3 scanners). To digitalise your document, you just need to place it against the device's screen.
Epson Perfection V500 Photo
Max Grey depth: 16-bit (64K grey levels), Interface type: USB 2.0, Style: Desktop, Functionality: Flatbed scanner, Max Colour depth: 48-bit colour
The sheet fed scanner is uniquely capable to digitalise sheet per sheet. It is enough to put your sheet into a feeder or directly into an opening for it to appear just a few seconds later unto your screen.
Genius Colour Page SF600 - 600 dpi x 1200 dpi – Sheet fed scanner
The ColorPage-SF600 is designed especially for Notebook users. It is not only powerful enough to scan, but it includes software to organize all of your documents, photos, articles, brochures, business cards, and it can recognize, e-mail, and print out text. It is priced at around £70.
Epson PX810fw printer
This elegant and intelligent Epson Stylus Photo PX910FW is a fully featured, Hi-Definition 4-in-1 for wireless home, Hi-definition photo printing, scanning and copying, plus integrated fax. Large 19.8cm touch panel for easy operation. It is priced around £400.
LCD Projectors
These projectors will be commonly used in educational facilities for relaying information to students. They will also be used in the work place for client presentations.
What do they do?
The LCD video projector contains three LCD panels. At the centre of the projector is a halogen bulb, which is surrounded by the panels. The panels produce light. As the halogen bulb heats up, the crystals melt and allow more light to pass through. Hence, the intensity of the halogen bulb brings about the difference in the tones. Higher the temperature of the bulb, lighter the tone and vice a versa.
Digital Video Cameras
1. Mini DV
The Sony DCR HC35 is a MiniDV camcorder with 20x optical zoom and a monstrous digital zoom, crystal clear LCD screen with touch controls and Nightshot. The MiniDV format has been around for some years now and a lot of people are changing to MiniDVD.
2. DVD-R
Record directly to DVD and enjoy it on your TV. Shooting high quality video is easy with the DCR-DVD650 Handycam camcorder. The powerful 60x optical zoom lens gets you close to the action, while SteadyShot image stabilization reduces blur. And with Hybrid recording technology, you can capture it all directly to a DVD or removable Memory Stick Duo or Memory Stick PRO Duo media.
3. Hard Drive
JVC Everio GZ-HD620BEK High Definition HDD Camcorder
The JVC Everio GZ-HD620BEK High Definition HDD Camcorder records Full HD video footage straight onto its built-in hard drive or onto a microSD media card, so your options are wide open when it comes to storage. These are priced at around £370.
4. SD Cards
Exchange the media from a digital camera to video camera by recording directly on an SD card. These cameras are great for quick shots and SD cards are relatively cheap.
Panasonic HDC-TM60EB-K Camcorder
The twin-memory TM60 records onto its 16-GB built-in memory and an SDXC, SDHC, or SD memory card. The TM60 employs Intelligent Resolution technology and is equipped with Crystal Engine Pro, which helps to record extremely clear, crisp motion images that exceed even Full-HD 1920 x 1080-pixel images in quality.These are priced at around £390.
5. Flash Memory
You can record a YouTube video or quick Internet clip by using a camcorder with flash memory. These cameras are not made to store a lot of footage, but they provide easy access and are small enough to fit into a purse.
Samsung VP-MX10/XEU Flash Memory Camcorder
This camcorder is an easy to use, carry all the time camcorder to capture exciting video images everyday Friendly connectivity enables direct link to PC for data transfer. You can record, playback and share video footage without wires on the camcorder itself. It has an 800k pixel CCD lens, 34 x optical zoom power, 1200 x digital zoom, a Schneider Kreuznach lens and an Electronic Image stabiliser technology to help remove 'shaky' recording. These are priced at around £170.
SLR Cameras
Lenses with short focal lengths (between 10 and 20mm) allow you to see a lot of scenery which is why they are also called wide angle lenses
Lenses with medium focal lengths (between 50 and 100mm) capture a pretty standard view of the world which is why they're called standard lenses
Lenses with long focal lengths (between 200 and 600mm) are used to get up close and personal with subjects that are far away and are called telephoto lenses.
1. Cropped Sensor
Canon EOS 550D
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Ideal for those who want to create large, poster-size prints – or crop images without losing any of the detail necessary for printing – EOS 550D’s 18MP CMOS sensor is outstanding in low light, and produces images with incredibly low noise. These are priced at around £900.
2. Full-Frame Sensor
Sony DSLR-A900 (DSLRA900) 24.6 MegaPixel
This is a 24.6 megapixel Digital Single Lens Reflex (D-SLR) camera, body only. With supreme imaging and professional features, a Full-frame CMOS sensor with Exmorâ„¢ technology,a High-performance pentaprism viewfinder with 100% coverage, and a High-speed 9-point AF, SteadyShot inside and photo quality 3.0-inch 921k dot LCD. These are priced at around £2000.
3. 4/3rds
Panasonic AG-AF100 (AGAF100) solid state camcorder
The AG-AF100 is set to be the World’s First Professional HD Camera Recorder Conforms the Micro Four Thirds Standard, allowing excellent compatibility with a wide range of 35mm lenses and camera accessories in order to deliver the shallow depth-of-field normally associated with 35mm film. These are priced at around £4000.
4. Micro 4/3rds
The Panasonic AG-AF101is a Professional HD camera
This camera is equipped with the Micro Four Thirds optical system usually used in single lens cameras. The AG-AF101 features HS-SDI output and mic input, remote control terminals, and versatile interfaces that are professional standards. The AG-AF101 offers PH mode recording to deliver AVCHD image quality in multiple HD video formats which include 24p and 30p. These are priced at around £5000.
5. Video/Still Cameras
Nikon D90
· 12 Megapixels
· 3' LCD Screen
· 4 Frames per Second
· SDHC Card Compatible
· D-Movie video mode
The powerful Nikon D90 was the world’s first digital SLR camera with a high definition movie function. The compact 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 lens features a handy 5.8x zoom which brings distant subjects into clear focus, and incorporates Vibration Reduction technology to eliminate camera shake, while its Silent Wave Motor delivers quiet, swift autofocus. These are priced at around £800.
DVD/CD Burners
A DVD Burner is useful for when you are looking to copy or duplicate a DVD disc or to burn video files into DVD Format so they can be played on a home DVD player. DVD discs allow Gigabytes of Data to be burned to the disc, in some cases a whole hard drive of data, making a tempting choice to use as a data back-up tool.
You will need to have a DVD-ROM to have the ability to read the data that was burned onto the disc.
DVD media has no advantage when it comes to burning Audio files such as MP3’s as DVD discs cannot be read on a normal CD-ROM or CD Player not leaving much of point on why you would burn audio to a DVD Disc.
Connecting Computers Tutorial
CD Burners however are slower than DVD burners although they do have more pros than con’s when comparing to a DVD Burner for data back-ups. Blank media Discs for CD Burners are either 650MB or 700MB in size, a lot smaller than that of a DVD disc.
CD-R discs can either hold data or audio and can be read in almost any CD-ROM and if the CD-R is made into an audio disc then its possible to read the disc in a home or a car CD Player – you will need to make sure the drive has the ability to read CD-R media, most newer models of CD-Players are compatible to read CD-R media.
Another pro of CD-R’s and CD-RW’s is the fact that you can burn video files such as MPEG or AVI onto disc so that they can be read in a home DVD player – most newer models of DVD players are mutli-read compatible meaning they can recognize CD-R’s or CD-RW’s.
So a back-up made with a DVD Burner is less compatible than a back-up made from a CD-Burner.
Editing Software
1.Image Manipulation
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is a raster graphics editor created by Adobe Systems. It is written in C++ and is available in 27 languages. The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop's native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, colour spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colours, clipping paths, and duotone settings.
The latest version of Photoshop will cost you around £350.
Adobe Fireworks
Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor. It was originally developed, using parts of xRes, by Macromedia, which Adobe acquired in 2005, and aimed at web designers (with features such as: slices, the ability to add hotspots etc.) for rapidly creating website prototypes and application interfaces. It is designed to integrate easily with other Adobe products, such as Dreamweaver and Flash.
The latest version of Fireworks will cost you around £230.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed once again by Adobe Systems. Illustrator is the companion product of Photoshop. Photoshop is primarily geared toward digital photo manipulation and photorealistic styles of computer illustration, while Illustrator provides results in the typesetting and logo graphic areas of design.
The latest version of illustrator will cost you between £300-£500.
GIMP
GIMP (short for the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool. It is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems. GIMP can be used to create basic animated images in the GIF format. It can also be used for essential image editing tasks such as resizing, editing, and cropping photos, photomontages combining multiple images, and converting between different image formats.
This powerful software is free.
2.Multimedia Authoring Software
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to Web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements and games. Flash manipulates vector and raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings, and still images. It supports bidirectional streaming of audio and video, and it can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera. Flash contains an Object-oriented language called ActionScript.
The latest version of Flash will cost you around £370.
Adobe Director
Adobe Director is a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia—now part of Adobe Systems. It allows users to build applications built on a movie metaphor, with the user as the "director" of the movie. Originally designed for creating animation sequences, the addition of a powerful scripting language called Lingo made it a popular choice for creating CD-ROMs and standalone kiosks and web content using Adobe Shockwave. Adobe Director supports both 2D and 3D multimedia projects.
The latest version of Director will cost you around £600.
Microsoft Expression Web
The latest version of Expression will cost you around £90.
Mediator 9
Mediator 9 is a premier multimedia authoring tool that allows you to create interactive CD-ROM presentations, dynamic HTML pages and Flash projects. Recognized for its award-winning icon-based editing, Mediator remains the leading multimedia authoring software for creating highly professional presentations, without requiring any coding or scripting.
Mediator 9 was priced at £300 when released.
