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Marcus Lynch
UFIE9S-20-3,
Multimedia Systems: Contexts and Applications
Persistence of Vision
As with animation, film and video rely on the
phenomenon of persistence of vision to
create an illusion of continuous visual
sensation
Fusion frequency is speed of changes
needed to achieve this illusion - typically 40
images per second. Below this speed, a
flickering effect is perceived
Video demands
Digitizing Video
Need to keep size constantly in mind
Video equipment digitizes time-varying signals
from sensors to generate bitmapped images
Using 24-bit colour, each frame of NTSC video
occupies 640x480x3 bytes = 900Kb. So, one
second of uncompressed NTSC video at ~30 fps
occupies 26Mb,one minute 1.6Gb
Storing such large amounts of data on CD-ROMS
or DVD not currently feasible, nor is transmission
over any but the fastest network - NOT Internet!
Disk arrays using SCSI standards can store entire
films - only film & TV studios can afford at present
Compressed Video
Digitization in Camera
Codecs
Analogue standards
Video Compression I
Video Compression II
Spatial Compression
Temporal Compression
Certain frames in sequence designated key
frames (often at regular intervals e.g every 6th
frame)
Key frames only spatially compressed & frames
between key frames are replaced by difference
frames - record only differences between current
frame and key frame
Differences typically affect only small portion of
frame (e.g. talking head shots) & therefore take
up less data
Can also apply to interlaced fields of video as
well as frames since conceptually similar
Symmetry of Compression
Compression and decompression may take place
simultaneously (a symmetrical codec) or not
(asymmetrical codec)
Generally compression takes longer than
decompression. If decompression takes too long,
the codec is unusable
Can measure amount of data loss but not the
effect on quality of compression. Terms to
describe video quality are so vague as to be
unhelpful.
Broadcast quality means good enough to be
broadcast (better than received!)
MPEG video
Motion Compression
MPEG key frames called I-pictures (I for intra) purely spatially compressed
Difference frames using previous pictures are
called P-pictures
Difference frames predicted from later frames are Bpictures
Can encode viseo clip as sequence of I-,P and Bpictures. B =1.5xP=3xI compression, but B more
computationally intensive to reconstruct & random
access to P- and B-pictures is difficult
For decoding, rearrange into bitstream order from
display order
Quicktime
Because of diversity of codecs and data formats,
little hope of a universal video file format
Base standardisation on architectural framework, at
level abstract enough to allow many instantiations,
Quicktime has established itself as a de facto
standard
Introduced by Apple in 1991, Quicktime
manipulates movies as objects. Here movie can be
seen as an abstraction of a video sequence but can
contain other types of media - really a framework for
organising, accessing and manipulating the data
that represnet the video frames, which may be
stored separately from the movie itself
Quicktime II
Originally Quicktime focus was on temporal
aspects of time-based media - records rate at
which it should be played back & current
position plus synchronisation to allow correct
playback speed on any system.
If cannot maintain frame rate, some frames
are dropped to achieve correct duration and
synchronisation with other elements (e.g.
soundtrack)
Time co-ordinate system also allows nonlinear access to (and therefore editing of)
individual frames
Quicktime III
Quicktime success is because it is a componentbased architecture, and can plug components into
structure to deal with new formats
Standard components include compressors,
sequence grabbers, movie controller, transcoders
Quicktime has its own file format - flexible way of
storing video and other media but also allows
treatment of other file formats as if native QT (eg
AVI, MPEG-1 and DV)
Developers of new formats & codecs do not need
to write higher level functionality as well
Wide range of platforms
Filmic Conventions
100= years of filmmaking have generated
elaborate ete of conventions about how film (and
thus video at first) edited
Action sequences cut on the action
Flashback sequences introduced by long dissolve with
narration overlapping the two scenes
Horror film music tracks are very predictable!
HTTP Streaming
Progressive download, or HTTP streaming is more
commonly seen on WWW. Not true streaming, but
a refinement of embedded video, where whole file
is transferred before playing back from disk. With
HTTP streaming, movie starts playing when
enough of it has been delivered i.e. when time
needed to download remainder of data = duration
of entire movie
Usually appreciable delay before playback
because of available bandwidth. Entire movie is
downloaded onto disk so need space, cannot be
used for live video. And does not allow you to skip
over parts of the file without downloading them