Table+of+Contents

=flat= = = Image Formats = =


 * GIF ** – which stands for "Graphic Interchange Format," was first standardized in 1987 by CompuServe, although the patent for the algorithm (mathematical formula) used to create GIF compression actually belongs to Unisys. Any color that's found in the GIF can be made transparent. Animation. When you do NOT interlace an image, you fill it in from the top to the bottom, one line after another.

"Compression" is a computer term that represents a variety of mathematical formats used to compress an image's byte size. ** JPEG ** – is a compression algorithm developed by the people the format is named after, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG's big selling point is that its compression factor stores the image on the hard drive in less bytes than the image is when it actually displays. The Web took to the format straightaway because not only did the image store in fewer bytes, it transferred in fewer bytes. As the Internet adage goes, the pipeline isn't getting any bigger so we need to make what is traveling through it smaller.
 * BMP ** - Microsoft invented the Bitmap format. It is a set of zeros and ones. Bitmaps are good images, but they're not great. If you've played with Bitmaps versus any other image formats, you might have noticed that the Bitmap format creates images that are a little heavy on the bytes. The reason is that the Bitmap format is not very efficient at storing data. Large file means slower loading time. On the Internet we don’t want to wait. a Bitmap was a simple series of pixels all stacked up. But the same image saved in GIF or JPEG format uses less bytes to make up the file. How? Compression.

For a long while, GIF ruled the Internet roost. JPEGs are less grainy than GIFs, but it also caused computers without a decent amount of memory to crash the browser. PNG was invented by a bunch of Internet fanatics after the computer company Unisys had announced they were going to cash in on commercial use of their LZH compression patent. Compression helps to make files smaller. Freely usable file formats for popular applications PNG offers better compression than GIF The PNG format has more to offer. For instance, it can be used for 24 bit pictures (16+ million colours!). The structure is a bit more logical. You can use a text viewer to get some information from a PNG file. Author name and description are saved as plain text.
 * PNG ** - is a format to store pictures in. You could compare it to GIF or JPEG. The letters PNG stand for Portable Network Graphics.

= = Text Formats = =

** TXT ** – file extension for text files (NotePad); most word processors will recognize .txt files.


 * RTF ** – Rich Text Format; was developed by the Microsoft Corp: Most word processors support the RTF format (usually in the Open or Save dialogs options are provided for specifying the document type). RTF is a text format only. Any documents containing graphics converted to RTF and then re-opened as an RTF document will not contain the original document graphics.


 * DOC ** – **. doc ** (an abbreviation of “document”) is a file extension for word processing documents; most commonly for Microsoft Word.


 * DOCX ** – This file extension is used by one of Microsoft's replacements for the DOC format. It can only be read by machines with MS-Word 2007 installed; typically found on new Vista machines.


 * PDF ** – Portable Document Format; a document-encoding process developed by Adobe that maintains page layout, fonts, and graphics and can include many features such as hyperlinks.

= = Audio Formats = =

** Wav **– (or WAVE), is short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. Support for WAV files was built into Windows 95 making it the standard for sound on PCs. WAV sound files end with a **.wav** extension and can be played by nearly all Windows applications that support sound. Better quality of sound but file size is large, therefore, most .wav files are smaller segments.
 * MP3 ** – It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a standard for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players. MP3 files are smaller in size and slightly less quaility than a .wav file.
 * MP4 ** – technology has been developed to provide DVD quality audio and pictures in an extremely small file size. MP4 was developed by The Apple Corporation as “the global multimedia standard, delivering professional-quality audio and video streams over a wide range of bandwidths, from cell phone to broadband and beyond”.


 * AU **– Aufio file that is a quality sound file; works well for sound effects because they are so small in size and load quickly.


 * WMA ** – (Windows Media Audio) An audio compression method from Microsoft. Known originally as MSAudio, this proprietary format competes with the MP3 and AAC methods. WMA encodes rapidly and is known to be especially effective at low bit rates.

= = Video Formats = =

** AVI ** – ** Audio Video Interleave **, known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in the early ‘90s as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback.

Video makes large files. A single image file can get big by itself, but video consists of frame after frame of images, which keep piling on one after another. Big video files fill up your hard disk, clog up your system when you try to play them, get too big to copy to a friend's machine, and take much to long to transfer over the net.
 * MOV ** – is a file extension used by the QuickTime-wrapped files . The format was created by Apple Computer to work with multimedia files. Though MOV files are quite often found in the web, to play them on Windows computer one has to install an extra component or convert to other format. MOV is a container format and can contain video, animation, and graphics.
 * MP4 ** – technology has been developed to provide DVD quality audio and pictures in an extremely small file size. MP4 was developed by The Apple Corporation as “the global multimedia standard, delivering professional-quality audio and video streams over a wide range of bandwidths, from cell phone to broadband and beyond”.
 * SWF ** – the file extension used for Flash movie/animation files.
 * // Size Matters //**

To make video useful and shareable on PC's, the amount of data must be reduced to reasonable sizes. There are three basic approaches to reducing the amount of data in a video clip: reducing the resolution and length of the clip, trimming the individual pixels and color data, and compressing the frames. Each clever new approach to squeezing down the size of video data creates yet another incompatible format, and requires a new codec to play the resulting files.


 * ** Reduction ** || ** Video Format ** || ** Size (MB) ** || ** Reduce ** ||
 * Resolution || 640x480, 30 fps, 24-bit || 26.37 || 100% ||
 * || 320x240, 30 fps, 24-bit || 6.59 || 25% ||
 * || 160x120, 30 fps, 24-bit || 1.65 || 6% ||
 * Frame Rate || 320x240, 15 fps, 24-bit || -3.30 || 13% ||
 * || 320x240, 10 fps, 24-bit || 2.20 || 8% ||
 * Pixel Size || 320x240, 10 fps, 16-bit || 1.46 || 6% ||
 * Color Format || 320x240, 10 fps, 9-bit || 0.82 || 3% ||
 * || 320x240, 10 fps, 12-bit || 1.10 || 4% ||
 * Compression || 320x240, 10 fps, JPEG 90% || 0.29 || 1% ||
 * || 320x240, 10 fps, JPEG 75% || 0.18 || 1% ||

=** Animations Formats **=
 * Animation **** – **// (with regard to computers) // – animation is the illusion of movement by creating scenes with slight changes.
 * SWF ** – the file extension used for Flash movie/animation files.
 * Path animation ** – having objects move following a given path (as in PowerPoint).


 * Cel animation ** - was the process used for most animated films of the 20th century. The individual frames of a traditionally animated film are photographs or drawings, which are first drawn on paper. To create the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the one before it.


 * Frame animation ** – using the same graphics with slight changes of objects on each card or slide.
 * Custom animation ** - is a set of effects which can be applied to objects in PowerPoint so that they will animate in the Slide Show.