MCA-233
Multimedia Technologies
Text, image, audio, video and animation as one subject — building multimedia projects, compressing the result, and delivering it over a network.
- Semester
- Semester 3
- Credits
- 3
- Scheme
- 3 lectures a week
- Contact hours
- 40 across four units
- Category
- Core Elective - III
What the paper is
Multimedia Technologies is a production paper with a communications second half. Units I and II are about making things — the building blocks, the hardware and authoring tools, animation techniques, video capture and editing, and how a project is planned, costed and delivered.
Unit III changes character entirely and becomes information theory: why compression is possible at all, then Huffman and arithmetic coding, run-length and LZW, and the transform-based standards JPEG, MPEG and MP3. It is the most examinable unit in the paper and the most algorithmic.
Unit IV puts the two together and asks how multimedia travels: integrated services and RSVP, standards for conferencing and interactive applications, IP fragmentation and QoS, and the protocols behind streaming.
What to concentrate on
- Huffman coding is the guaranteed numerical question — build the tree from given frequencies, assign codes, compute the average code length and the compression ratio. LZW on a short string is the second.
- Know the difference between lossless and lossy compression and be able to say which is appropriate for which medium and why. It frames most of Unit III's descriptive marks.
- For Unit IV, concentrate on QoS: what the parameters are, why best-effort IP does not provide them, and what integrated and differentiated services do about it.
Syllabus, unit by unit
Summarised from the approved scheme. Hours are the contact hours the scheme allots, which is a fair guide to where the marks sit.
Unit I · Introductory concepts and building blocks
10 hours- Definitions of multimedia, CD-ROM technology, applications of multimedia
- Multimedia projects: the stages, requirements, skills and training; introduction to virtual reality; challenges
- Hardware: Macintosh and Windows production platforms, memory and storage devices; software and basic tools
- Building blocks: text, sound, images, animation and video; image colour schemes; digitisation of audio and video
- Assembling and delivering a project: planning and costing, designing and producing, content and talent, delivering
Unit II · Animation, video and authoring tools
10 hours- Animation: basic techniques, motion graphics, 2D and 3D animation, cell and computer animation
- Tweening and morphing, dynamics, kinematics and reverse kinematics
- Video: how video works, analog and digital video, recording and tape formats, shooting and editing
- Multimedia tools: authoring tools, modelling, rendering, texture shading, file formats
Unit III · Compression
10 hours- The need for compression; lossless and lossy compression; taxonomy of algorithms; basics of information theory
- Text compression: Huffman coding, dynamic Huffman coding, arithmetic coding
- Entropy encoding: run-length coding, the LZW algorithm
- Source coding: transform coding with JPEG and MPEG, audio compression with MP3, statistical coding by pattern substitution
Unit IV · Multimedia communication and streaming
10 hours- Multimedia information representation and networks; integrated services, RSVP and differentiated services
- Multimedia on 4G and 5G networks; standards for interpersonal communication, conferencing, interactive applications and interactive television
- Multimedia and the internet: IP datagrams, fragmentation and reassembly, QoS support, IPv4/IPv6 interoperability, designing audio and video for the web
- Digital communication: asynchronous, synchronous and isochronous transmission modes
- Streaming: stored audio and video, best-effort service, protocols for real-time interactive applications, scheduling and policing mechanisms
How it is examined
- Question 1 is compulsory, covers the whole syllabus, and is made of objective or short-answer questions. It carries 12 marks.
- The rest of the paper is four units matching the four above. Each unit sets two questions and you attempt one, so there are four more answers at 12 marks each.
- Examiners are asked to map every question to a course outcome using Bloom's taxonomy, which is why questions are phrased as “apply”, “analyse” or “evaluate” rather than only “explain”.
The pass mark is 40 out of 100 in every paper.
Learning objectives
- Concepts, techniques and tools for creating and editing interactive multimedia applications
- Current and future issues related to multimedia technology
- Theoretical and practical aspects of designing multimedia systems with contemporary hardware and software
Assumed beforehand
- Basic knowledge of information technology
Paired in the scheme with MCA-267 Lab based on Core Elective III.
Books it is taught from
- TB1John Vince, “Virtual Reality Systems”, Pearson Education, 8th edition, 2014
- TB2Fred Halsall, “Multimedia Communications: Applications, Networks, Protocols and Standards”, Pearson, 1st edition, 2013
- TB3Tay Vaughan, “Multimedia: Making it Work”, McGraw-Hill, 9th edition, 2014
Notes for MCA-233
Lecture notes, question papers and assignments filed against MCA-233 are in the library. Everything there has been checked by a moderator before it appears, and an account is free — new ones are approved by hand, which is what keeps the shelf clean.