Completely revised 3rd edition of our bestselling textbook, published 20 February 2009.

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Product Description

Designed as the foundation text in multimedia, this comprehensive resource covers basic principles of each media type – text, graphics, audio, animation and video – describing their digitization and progressing onto issues that arise when media are combined.

This edition includes completely revised and re–written pedagogy which takes account of substantial instructor feedback, as well as market research and development on other Chapman titles. There is also a web/Flash emphasis and proper coverage of MPEG4 and DVD in line with current technology trends.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #155725 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 732 pages

Review
"This is a core text for undergraduate and masters courses in multimedia." (Digital Arts, October 2007)

From the Back Cover
Digital photography and video, MP3 players, smart phones and the World Wide Web have become essential in today’s world. The digital representation of images, video, animation, sound and text has become integrated in every part of our lives and their combination into multimedia is routine.

Digital multimedia is often interactive. People can interact with multimedia using playback controls, or more innovatively using direct manipulation, and they can interact through multimedia – user interfaces that incorporate multimedia elements permit new ways of working with data and computation.

Digital Multimedia is the best selling core text for undergraduate and masters courses in the exciting discipline of multimedia, combining a broad and deep account of technology with an inside understanding of multimedia content and its practical application. Beginning with an overview of the nature of multimedia and digital representations, it continues with chapters devoted to each media type, detailing how they are represented in digital form and how they are created and manipulated on computers. Later chapters describe how media may be combined and how scripting may be used to add interactivity. Whole chapters are devoted to visual design and accessibility, and to how multimedia may be delivered over the Internet. Each chapter includes key point summaries and exercises. An extensive glossary of important terms is provided.

This third edition has been extensively revised and updated to reflect changes in technology, the increasing importance of interactivity and the emerging role of multimedia as an interface to applications and services.

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Customer Reviews

Very good, lots of detail - well written and attractive.
You might suppose that a book which covers such a wide subject would have to be rather cursory on any particular topic. Well, it could be like that, but it isn't like that. Each chapter (vector graphics, colour, hypertext, animation etc.) is written very carefully, with a wealth of detail.

The format is clear and attractive, with asides and technical passages set in a smaller font which makes it easily digestible, even when describing intricacies - "the following description of character code standards is necessarily somewhat dry", we are warned - actually I liked this bit a lot.

The illustrations are excellent, not only when showing techniques for image manipulation and 3D graphics, but also to help clarify other topics like audio compression, colour management, font selection, synchronised multimedia etc. There's also a lot of good advice on aspects of presentation and style, but delivered gently, with a touch of humour. The book itself shows that the authors know what they are talking about.

When necessary, attention is drawn to the constraints that might limit what can be achieved with current hardware, and to the complexities of the numerous sound and video formats. The section on video standards and compression techniques is very informative here.

I was surprised by how much this book could tell me even in areas that I thought I already knew well. It will be valuable as a course text and also as a reference work.

Only place to find SMIL
The only published book in which SMIL information has been written (or of those I could find). This is a great book for a wide variety of digital multimedia subjects from typography, graphic design, SMIL, html, xml and sound. Written like a college text book, it has broad reach and appears very good for multimedia proffessionals who need info on new technologies but don't speak full-on geek techie (aka those who dont like to learn from white papers or W3C specification lists). And it does exactly what it says it does on the tin...

Great Book
This book has really helped me with my studies so far and i have only had it a couple of weeks. It is really detailed, maybe a bit too detailed but i am at uni so this amount of detail is needed i suppose. I recommend this book to anyone doing a practical media related subject.