Week 6: Clear

Week six came across extremely clear to me. Multimedia is something that I am very familiar with being a Journalism major. I have taken many classes on photography and technology which helped make this topic very easy to understand. Multimedia is broken down into three categories; images, audio and video. Out of these three categories the clearest topic was images.

Images in multimedia are broken down into two separate graphic fields, raster and vector. Raster graphics are an array of colored dots most commonly known as "pixels" that create a bitmap. The only problem with this type of graphic is when you scale an image to make it larger it sometimes becomes jagged or pixelized.  While on the other hand, vector graphics are represented by primitives, which are geometrical and expressed mathematically. The benefits to using a vector graphic is that you can zoom in and out to infinity without losing resolution (clarity/sharpness) and there is no pixilation. 

Images can be saved in multiple file formats, BMP, GIF, JPG, and PNG. The BMP format is extremely useful when creating original copies that can be edited later because they are uncompressed. When you compress a file it tends to lose its quality after multiple copies. Compression can be done in two formats Lossless, which eliminates redundancy, saves space, and is great for archiving, and Lossy which discards data but makes the file extremely small and great for transferring.

Multimedia is extremely important in the business world because it can make or break a business deal. The more technologically advanced corporation usually gets the best offers, sells the most products, and hire the best employees. By knowing how to use your computers multimedia you can create your own promotional material, you can record your own music recordings and videos to send to potential employers. Also, once hired in a business you can use multimedia power-points at work to make your presentations more professional. Multimedia and business evolve together hand in hand, and it is almost essential in todays society to be able to manipulate and produce digital media. 

Creating multimedia images is simple. It can be accomplished by using the following methods:

• Digital Camera
• Webcam
• Scanner (Careful of copyrights when scanning pictures)
• ScreenCaps (PrtScrn)

The following link helped me to understand all the various types of multimedia and cleared up any questions I may have had on the subject. It showed me a bitmap color chart, and clarified the different types of multimedia programs there are for graphics.

http://www.grassrootsdesign.com/intro/graphic.php