Digital Multimedia Formats

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Digital Multimedia Formats

In today's information age, motion pictures and audio have moved into digital formats. The expansion of the Internet has fueled technological development at a furious pace, bringing us movies over the Web, DVD players in the home, and MP3 music players in our pockets. This technology enables more people to create multimedia without a heavy investment in equipment. A desktop computer works nicely , thank you very much. With that in mind, let's focus on the specific multimedia technology you will use with Pro Tools.

QuickTime

QuickTime is a cross-platform software technology developed by Apple Computer for playback and creation of multimedia content. It is also the media player format supported by Pro Tools. Any movie or video that you would like to import directly into Pro Tools must be in a QuickTime-compatible format. QuickTime supports many different codecs, including MPEG, AVI, Sorenson, Cinepak, Flash, DV, and others. In order to use QuickTime movies, you must install QuickTime on your Pro Tools computer. Macs have QuickTime installed by default; PC owners will need to install it separately. It is best to use the latest version, as it will support the widest variety of codecs, including the new MPEG-4 standard.

MPEG Codecs

MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group. The MPEG group was formed in the late 1980s by the International Standards Organization (ISO), headed by Leonardo Chiariglione. The ISO's job was to create standard methods of coding audio and video into compressed, digital formats. The term MPEG is used to denote a whole family of audio and video compression algorithms developed by MPEG. They are MPEG-1 (which includes the mp3 audio format), MPEG-2 (which is used for DVD and HDTV encoding among other things), and MPEG-4 (a next generation codec). MPEG-3 was originally intended as an extension of MPEG-2 for use with DVDs but was eventually merged entirely into MPEG-2. Don't confuse it with the "mp3" audio format, which is short for MPEG-1, layer 3. All of the MPEG codecs are supported in the latest version of QuickTime (currently 6.0).

AVI Codec

AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave and is the standard multimedia format in Windows. As Pro Tools uses only QuickTime for playback of movies, Windows users will need to install QuickTime on their systems. AVI files will play back in QuickTime, so PCs can take advantage of their native video formats.

NOTE

CAUTION: WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER DOCUMENTS (.WMV)

Windows Media Player documents are not compatible with QuickTime and are not usable in Pro Tools. This is a common AV format for PCs and Internet movies. These files must be converted into QuickTime movies before importing into Pro Tools.

DV Codec

DV is a confusing term, as it is used for many things, including as a generic designation "digital video." The technical term refers to an international standard created for consumer, semi-pro, and professional digital video equipment, including DV (consumer camcorders), DVC Pro, and DVCAM. The unique aspect of DV equipment is its ability to digitally transfer audio and video over the IEEE 1394 interface commonly known as Apple's "FireWire" or Sony's "iLink." This technology was originally developed by Apple Computer and adopted in 1995 by the International Standards Organization as IEEE-1394-1995. This combination has allowed desktop computer users to import high-quality video into their computers and then edit and process it all within a digital environment. Straight transfers between DV equipment using the 1394 interface are perfect digital clones . The quality of DV video is very high and it is well suited to audio studios because of its low cost.

Audio post-production studios sometimes receive video on DV tapes. It is possible to use a consumer camcorder like the one in Figure 1.8 to transfer DV movies into a Pro Tools computer for use in audio post-production. I'll go into detail on this subject in Chapter 4, "Getting Started with Pro Tools and Video."

Figure 1.8. Here is a photo of a Sony TVR-17 DV camcorder that uses the "iLink" IEEE 1394 interface to connect to desktop computers and other DV equipment. I use this camcorder to capture DV files into the Pro Tools computer and then view the movie on a regular TV monitor.


Flash and Shockwave

Two Internet media worth mentioning are Flash and its big brother Shockwave, both developed by Macromedia. These are very popular technologies for adding motion and graphic elements to Web sites and CD-ROMs without requiring large amounts of bandwidth. Flash files amount to moving slide shows or, technically speaking, vector graphics that appear as animation and can contain embedded video as well. The ability to time certain visual events with audio files constitutes a form of multimedia that is becoming more common on the Web. I have created many soundtracks to go with flash movies and Web sites that entail all the aspects of a full-blown film or video production. The specific needs of Flash movies and Shockwave files will be discussed in Chapter 4 and in Chapter 8, "Mixing to Picture in Pro Tools."

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PRO TOOLS R for video, film, and multimedia
PRO TOOLS R for video, film, and multimedia
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 70

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