Digital video technology
- 1. Film Trailers The purpose of a film trailer is to give a taster for what the film will be like, usually they show the most gripping parts of the film for example, if it is an action film, the trailer would generally be showing the parts with the most excitement to make you, as the viewer want to see it even more. Film trailers have been around for almost a century now as the first one was released in 1913 and they have adapted a lot since they originally came out, at the very beginning, the objective of a film trailer was to tantalize the viewers and make them want to watch the film, which is still the principle today, but the main thing that had to be done in the early 19th century was just to get certain parts of the film and put some text with them and that was the mind set back then on ‘gripping the viewer’. Whereas nowa- days with the new editing and technology, films and their trailers have been dramatically updated. Music is an extremely key factor in film trailers, it sums up the entire trailer, watching one with the sound muted would be boring and wouldn’t interest you in the slightest but when it is turned on and synched with the editing of the clips, it really enhances the overall trailer and pulls you closer to wanting to watch it. Depending on the type of film, it is either dramatic and tense music, or upbeat dance music for when it is to do with something else like street-dancing or car films. As time progressed, directors of the films realised that there was much more that could be done to entice the viewer, for example, in the 1960’s teaser trailers were introduced which was usually a stand still imagine with a slogan and the title of the film, not giving to much information away but just enough to make you want to watch the full trailer. A good example of a fantastic film trailer is the 2012 film ‘The Avengers’. It shows great footage from some of the clips with some dramatic music in the background to make it even more intense. It has small bits of text to illustrate when the film will be released and how anticipated the film has been. Release Clip from date film
- 2. WWW: The World Wide Web The World Wide Web is one of the greatest releases in history, we take for granted how amazing it really is. It has near enough anything you would ever want to know about any topic. The WWW is near enough the dictionary of life, having anything and everything you want to find or know about using internet search providers like ‘Google’ which has become the most popular source for information and pretty much anything you want. You can listen to endless streams of music and watch videos / movies through it. You don’t have to use a bog standard computer to access the internet, you can gain access to it from several different places and devices nowadays. Most mobile phones produced in the last decade have the option on the internet as you wish, as long as you have an internet connection (in range of a router/modem). Even then, phones like blackberries and iPhones have their own type of connections which allows them to connect to the internet whenever they choose, as it is a type of Wi-Fi. A huge benefit of using the internet is the endless shopping available to you. You can the WWW to browse through your favourite shops or browse the web to find the cheapest deals on a specific item you are looking for without having to move out of your house. Sites like ‘Amazon’ are great examples of this. Amazon has products of all varieties and has them for fantastic prices as well as shipping globally. Saves so much travelling to go out and see the shops in a shopping centre you can view everything with the touch of a mouse. Another great advantage about the internet is social networking. You can connect and talk with near enough anyone in the world nowadays from wherever you are using sites like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’. The WWW allows you to bypass using phones or going out to see people, as you can communicate and talk to each other from anywhere. The internet saves a lot of travelling, especially for things like booking tickets for holidays or trains. You can just go to the website of the company you are buying from and do It manually from there, instead of you having to go out and purchase them in person. The World Wide Web has unlimited entertainment for you as you browse through sites with knowledge on your favourite celebrities or download your best films for free to watch in brilliant HD quality. Lots of people could not imagine life without the internet as they grew up with it, but as a summary, it makes almost every aspect of your social life and work much more interesting and easier for information grinding and talking to friends.
- 3. Mobile Phones Mobile phones are a huge part of everybody’s life in this day and age, most people own one and if they do not, they most certainly know someone who does. Modern mobiles have just about anything you would need in your everyday life such as calendars, quick SMS texting, access to the internet and the new phones even have the ability to download apps from a store for even more enhanced mobile capabilities, like the ‘Whatsapp’ which gives you the ability to send pictures freely to your contacts over an application bypassing the payment option of doing it through a normal text and overall gives you a much more enjoyable way of talking to your friends and family. The first recognised mobile phones were implemented in the 1940’s and they were huge, bulky phones which had a very low battery life and only allowed a certain amount of calls for a period of time. As technology has evolved since this time, so have mobile phones and they have been modernized a lot. Mobile phones as of the year 2000 and onwards, have been fitted with technology we all take for granted when we use them. You can call people from wherever you are weather it be home / mobile or work. There is near enough unlimited accessibility to the internet where you can go on any website and act as if you were on a computer with the open web surfing available to you as you please watching films and streaming videos as you please, and there is texting, texting is a massive contributory factor to why people have mobile phones, it is another method of communication except you type instead of speak. Most people text and do it more than 10-15 times a day without even realising. Phones released in the past 5 years are the phones of today such as Blackberries, Smartphones and iPhones. They all have something unique that phones released prior to this didn’t have anything like it. Blackberries have the well known Blackberry Messenger which is the same as texting but much quicker and has little things added to it to make it faster and more enjoyable. Such as you can see when people have seen your message, and when they are replying. You can have profile pictures and write about yourself so in sense it isn’t just texting, it is a little social networking application and the majority of people who buy Blackberries buy them specifically for BBM as of how useful and fun it is. iPhones and Smartphones are similar, they can have endless pages of apps and have just about everything you need for what a mobile phone can do for you. Mobile phones will adapt to the new technology and evolve with what is introduced in the coming years but it certainly has come a long way since the 1940’s.
- 4. User Generated Content User generated content is usually referred to websites and information put onto them. Most websites nowadays are commonly designed and formatted by businesses using professionals to design them. Whereas the idea of ‘user generated’ implies that something is designed and produced by the ‘user’. Which is exactly what it is, when something is done using ‘user generated content’ it means that a website or a form of media has been produced by a normal person who isn’t particularly the most experienced nor professional and even amateur. Another definition of this term, is if somebody who doesn’t necessarily have the highest standard of qualifications came out of education but still wanted to do something through technology, they can, the main idea behind user generated content is that anybody with the intellectual knowledge capable to make websites and forms of media, can do it regardless of their educational background. Some of the most popular websites around the web are in fact, user generated. One of the main ones is ‘Wikipedia’. On here, anybody with sufficient expertise can edit the site to put Information from their own knowledge to change the definition or explanation of a certain term or word. This is a site where everybody can work together in order to create an online encyclopaedia completely designed and daily modified by the general public. The thing that makes Wikipedia special from most other UGC websites is that there is no author that gets paid for people editing the site, in contrast with sites which stream music and other types of media which commonly have advertisements through out your time on the web- site, and for every one that you view, it sends money to the author of the site / the stream- er. Social networking sites like ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ and even the super popular ‘YouTube’ are all also great examples of user generated content, as with the social networking sites, you can upload your own photos, videos and even put your own status on to tell others how you’re feeling. As you are doing it all yourself, it is all user generated. As for ‘YouTube’ you can view, upload and share videos. There is even an option to share them on the sites mentioned previously as they are all so popular on the web. More and more sites are becoming user generated as time goes on, there are people every day designing and editing websites. User generation is for nominally popular and will continue to evolve for years to come.
- 5. Digital File Formats Digital image formats is the computerized way of organizing and storing digital images onto depending on which program / device you were using. Image files, like the ones you save and use every day, are made up of digital data in one of the many formats available than can then be rasterized for use on your computer screen. If you pay attention to the type of format on the end of a digital image you may have saved on your computer for example, jpg or png, they all have their separate and individual meanings for how big the file might be or what program the image was taken / designed on and they all have a purpose. JPEG standing for “Joint Photographic Experts Group” or more commonly known as JPG, is one of, if not the most common file type for digital photos and other digital graphics. JPG is also the most common file type for images taken with digital cameras and is regularly used for graphics on websites like blogs and even social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The reason why JPG images are so good at what they do is because, unlike GIF files, which show significant loss in photo image quality, JPG images can have file size reduction without losing enough quality to make it look distorted or unclear. A PNG file meaning “Portable Networks Graphics” is a type of bitmapped image format which was originally created to improve and replace the previous GIF file type as an image file format which does not require a patent in order to be used. There are hundreds of digital file formats varying throughout the alphabet as there are thousands of programs that use different ones. MOV is a type of video file and a common multimedia format often used for saving movies and other video files. QuickTime use MOV files as it is a media company popular for its QuickTime Media Player. An MOV video file functions as a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of date which could be audio, video, effects or text like subtitles.
- 6. Digital Rights Management System: The digital rights management system (DRM) was originally intended to be a type of technological control that is commonly used by hardware manufacturers, online publishers and any individual with the aim of limiting the used of digital content after a product is sold. DRM can be any type of technology that possesses uses of digital content that are not wanted or required by the content provider. Major companies like Amazon and Apple Inc., use the digital rights management system as they are such big and popular companies that they need the protection. DRM was first implemented in 1998 in the United States when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed. The main intention from this was to impose penalties on people who make technologies whose main function is to bypass content protection technologies. The general and primary objective of the DRM when it was first introduced was to act as a form of protection for companies to combat copyright issues over the internet. Some argue that the DRM is only there to inconvenience legitimate customers. A lot of people think that industry supporters of DRM introduced this so that we could not have total control over out media and devices that we normally would, as a result of this, the other common term for DRM is digital restrictions management as it is believed to be a way of companies preventing you from fully owning your media. The true definition of digital restrictions management is basically, where technology controlling what you can do with the digital media that you own. For example, if a program doesn’t let you share a song or play an internet game as you don’t have an internet connection, this is you being restricted by DRM, in other words, it is a damaging good preventing you from doing what is rightly yours, and consequently this is creating a dangerous future for freedom, privacy and censorship.
- 7. Aspect Ratios 4:3 and 16:9 The aspect ratio of an image describes the proportional relationship between its width and its height. Commonly, the ratio is expressed as two numbers. The two most popular being 4:3 and 16:9. The aspect ratio 4:3 is used by most digital cameras. 4:3 digital format popularity was developed originally to match the prevailing digital 4:3 computer monitors but nowadays they are used for other aspects of technology. The 16:9 ratio, is another format that has its roots in the APS film camera. The 16:9 ratio is also the standard image aspect ratio for HDTV. It is gaining popularity as a format in all clas- ses of consumer still cameras which also shoot high definition. When still cameras have a HD video capability, some can also record stills in the 16:9 format, ideal for HD televisions and the majority of widescreen computer displays.