Web Animation

Animation is widely used on the internet. Why? Well, what would most likely catch your attention? A still image of a building with dull colours, or a moving image with a brightly coloured bird flying around rapidly? Obviously, a moving image would capture your attention instantly. This is the main reason for including animation on web pages, to draw the viewers attention to something, to provide a demonstration or to entertain. 

The need for movement or an animation on a page depends on the purpose and content of the page. A financial institute would not really need animations on their pages, while an entertainment site obviously would have such movement.

Animation on a web page is any form of movement of objects or images. Animations are usually done in Adobe Flash, although Java and GIF animations are also used in many websites. Streaming video in Flash is coming increasingly popular.

Animated banners

 

Banner ads are all over the internet. On a lot of websites, you come to watch a video or get some information and are instantly bombarded with ads. Websites are paid to display these ads, so this is how they keep their services running.

A lot of these types of ads include animations. The animations in the ad are intended to attract your attention and entice you to take an action, like clicking on the banner to see more about the product or service. Another example is an animated company logo. Its movement draws your attention to the logo.

SWAG

Applications in Interactive Media

In recent years, technology has advanced so hugely, that ideas that were once thought to be impossible are now as easy to access as water. Moving images are no longer restricted to the cinema and TV, changes in technology mean that people expect to be able to watch and share movies online and on the move. As the proportion of internet users on broadband continues to grow, it becomes increasingly possible to view, upload and download video clips, ranging from user generated content to popular films.

As devices like mobile phones at portable media players are always being refined and improved, it has become increasing easy to share videos with the world. People are now using their portable players to play games, games consoles to watch movies and phones to use the internet – the entire industry has become interlinked. Also, with DVD replacing VHS as the home video standard, most popular formats have become digital.

There are many ways videos are used in Interactive media. Some of these are:

·         Promotional Videos – These are used to promote products/services such as events, films, games, music, etc.

·         Standard Advertising – Advertising that is generally seen on television, promoting products or shows, etc.

·         Interactive Advertising – Advertising that relies on the user’s input, usually found on the internet.

·         User general content – videos created by users of the internet, spread by video sharing websites such as youtube.com. This is an extremely easy, effective and quick method of sharing videos, as the internet is accessed by millions of people daily. 

·         Viral advertising - Viral advertising is a type of advertising that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives. 

·         Games – with the introduction of flash, internet surfing became introduced to an entire new level of interactive entertainment. Flash allowed websites to incorporate games into their websites. These games, also known by their related technology as "Flash games" or "Java games", became increasingly popular because older games (e.g Pacman) were recreated, attracting other audiences. 

·         E-learning – with the internet being a dominant platform for acquiring information, a lot of people have taken advantage of this by using online methods to learn things like languages, skills etc. There are countless websites and online services where you can learn practically anything. A lot of the time, the content is user generated, for example – tutorial videos on Youtube.

Platform

The range of digital media platforms on which interactive products can be experienced is constantly evolving. In broad terms, though, they fall into four overlapping categories. These should be thought of as 'content platforms', rather than technical ones. Each is typically associated with one or more delivery platforms, which may apply to several content platforms and may change over time.

These platforms are:

·         Web & Platform - This is delivered to a user through various means, including (but not limited to) Desktop Computers, Mobile Devices, TV’s via set-top boxes, Broadband Hubs, and Wireless networks. 

·         Interactive Platform - This is the idea that the program, itself, might change based on viewer input. (e.g BBCs Red button service)

·         Electronic Games - These are forms of interactive entertainment and can be delivered on various platforms, such as Desktop Computers, TV's, Consoles or mobile devices via CD-Rom, DVD or online. 

·         Offline multimedia – Any type of device that can function without the internet. TVs, PCs, Kiosks, Games consoles, DVD/CDs etc.

Technology

Video compression

Way back in the day when digital video was first being born, video was stored in its pure, uncompressed format, much like digital audio. This meant that it took a LOT of space. Then along came video compression. Probably the earliest and truly successful video codecs (CODEC stands for COmpressor/DECompressor) was MPEG1. The actual standard for MPEG1 video is over a decade old. Also, the MPEG2 standard used in DVDs is more than half a decade old!
But how does compression work? Well like with any kind of compression there are two kinds: lossless and lossy.

Lossless compression

Lossless compression, as the name implies, means that after compressing the video, and then decompressing it, you wind up with the exact same data as you put in. This is comparable to something like ZIP or RAR (In fact, the most common lossless codec out there, Huffyuv, basically uses the same compression algorithm as ZIP on each frame of video to achieve its compression). Lossless has the advantage that no matter how many times you compress it, you still haven't lost any video data.

The bad part is that most often you don't save nearly as much space as you would with other lossy compression algorithms. There are many different lossless codecs these days, but lossy codecs and formats are more popular as they save memory space and are easy to distribute over the internet.

Lossy compression

This is the form of video compression most people are familiar with. 95% of all video codecs out there are lossy, meaning that when you compress the video and then decompress it, you do not get back what you put it. Now, this isn't as bad as it may sound. Obviously if you're compressing something like a text document, you don't want to lose any of the data, but with something like a picture, even if a few bits and pieces aren't quite right, you can still make out the generally gist of the image, which is similar with audio. Famous lossy codecs include MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 (AKA DivX3.11, DivX4/5, XviD, Quicktime MPEG4), DV (and its variants DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, Digital-S, etc), Windows Media Video, RealVideo, Sorenson, Indeo, and the classic Cinepak.