Our weekly readings for Week 3 were to support our upcoming lecture on multimedia representation and storage from the point of the documents compression to how those documents benefit the public.
These readings made me think about my film work in high school and college. When the movie was done we would compress the film in its entirety so it was easier to share. The art of compression was always a little tricky, as the rate of its compression and the desired quality of the output had to be factored depending on how the movie was going to be used. Typically we would compress it several ways: one that would be small enough to be shown on the web, one that would be shown on a large screen, one that could be emailed, etc. Usually the movie would be exported into a quicktime format, a much, much smaller file than the working file. The file that was being worked with off of the program held all the footage, titles, audio, sound effects and music in its raw form, making it impossibility large to burn to a DVD or rely on for universal viewing.
Needless to say, I have a pretty good understanding of why the compression process is important, even if I only have an inkling of how its actually done. After reading the articles on data compression I can't really say whether or not I understand it much better, as the in depth look pretty much went over my head, although the fact that data compression is integral to sharing multimedia on the web.
Without compression it would be unfeasible to think that we could put all those photographs (like the Imaging Pittsburgh project) or millions of videos (YouTube) on the internet. Thanks to my undergrad education I have seen compression's usefulness first hand. I first realized how small images/videos have to be on a web site when I took a web design course in college. It was kinda annoying at first that I had to resize all my images and learn the concept of HTML and CSS to design a web page that wouldn't take all day to load just because I didn't take the time to accommodate. Luckily for the everyday person, there are programs such as Flickr and Youtube or templated designs for websites that take the work out of going through each file. You can load a video file onto YouTube and it will adjust the quality of the video so that the viewer can watch the movie in a timely fashion. If you take a photo with your smartphone it will adjust the size of the image so that it will send as a MMS. Its really neat and makes life so much easier.
In summary, surfing the internet would be pretty boring if data compression did not exist.
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