Text Editing and Word Processing Tools

• Word processor is usually the first software tool computer users learn.


• Word processors such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect are powerful applications that include spell checkers, table formatters, thesauruses, and pre-built templates for letters, resumes, purchase orders, and other common documents.

OCR Software

• With optical character recognition, it turns bitmapped characters into electronically recognizable ASCII text.


• Scanner is typically used to create the bitmap. Then the software breaks the bitmap into chunks according to whether it contains text or graphics, by examining the texture and density of areas of the bitmap and by detecting edges.

Painting and Drawing Tools

• Painting software, such as Photoshop, Fireworks, and Painter, is dedicated to producing crafted bitmap images.


• Drawing software, such as CorelDraw, FreeHand, Illustrator, Designer, and Canvas, is dedicated to producing vector-based line art easily printed to paper at high resolution.


• Look for these features in a drawing or painting package:
  1. An intuitive graphical user interface with pull-down menus, status bars, palette control, and dialog boxes for quick, logical selection
  2. Scalable dimensions, so you can resize, stretch, and distort both large and small bitmaps
  3. Paint tools to create geometric shapes, from squares to circles and from curves to complex polygons
  4. Ability to pour a color, pattern, or gradient into any area
  5. Ability to paint with patterns and clip art
  6. Customizable pen and brush shapes and sizes
  7. Eyedropper tool that samples colors
  8. Autotrace tool that turns bitmap shapes into vector-based outlines
  9. Support for scalable text fonts and drop shadows
  10. Multiple undo capabilities, to let you try again
  11. History function for redoing effects, drawings, and text

3-D Modeling and Animation Tools

• With 3-D modeling software, objects rendered in perspective appear more realistic.


• A good 3-D modeling too] should include the following features:
  1. Multiple windows that allow you to view your model in each dimension, from the camera's perspective, and in a rendered preview
  2. Ability to drag and drop primitive shapes into a scene
  3. Ability to create and sculpt organic objects from scratch
  4. Lathe and extrude features
  5. Color and texture mapping
  6. Ability to add realistic effects such as transparency, shadowing, and fog
  7. Ability to add spot, local, and global lights, to place them anywhere, and manipulate them for special lighting effects
  8. Unlimited cameras with focal length control
  9. Ability to draw spline-based paths for animation

Image-Editing Tools

• Image-editing applications are specialized and powerful tools for enhancing and retouching existing bitmapped images.


• Here are some features typical of image-editing applications and of interest to multimedia developers:
  1. Multiple windows that provide views of more than one image at a time
  2. Conversion of major image-data types and industry-standard file formats
  3. Direct inputs of images from scanner and video sources
  4. Employment of a virtual memory scheme that uses hard disk space as RAM for images that require large amounts of memory
  5. Capable selection tools, such as rectangles, lassos, and magic wands, for selecting portions of a bitmap
  6. Image and balance controls for brightness, contrast, and color balance
  7. Good masking features
  8. Multiple undo and restore features
  9. Color-mapping controls for precise adjustment of color balance

Plug-Ins

• Image-editing programs usually support powerful plug-in available from third-party developers that allow to warp, twist, shadow, cut, diffuse, and otherwise filter images for special visual effects.


• Ex. Vertigo's HotTEXT turn text into 3-D objects, EyeCandy from AlienSkin Software offers a comprehensive set of filters.

Animation, Video, and Digital Movie Tools

• Animations and digital video movies are sequences of bitmapped graphic scenes (frames).


• Also can be made within the authoring system by rapidly changing the location of objects, or sprites, to generate an appearance of motion.


• Moviemaking tools typically take advantage of QuickTime for Macintosh and Windows and Microsoft Video for Windows, also known as Audio Video Interleaved (AVI), and let to create, edit, and present digitized motion video segments, usually in a small window in your project.

QuickTime

• QuickTime movie file format
  Provides a standard method for storing video, audio, and even text descriptions about a media composition.


• QuickTime Media Abstraction Layer
  Describes how computer should access the media that is included in the QuickTime movie.


• QuickTime media services
  Media services part of QuickTime not only has built-in support for over 35 media file formats, including most major video, still image, audio, animation, and MIDI formats, but also allows developers to plug in their own new or custom media formats.

Microsoft Video for Windows

• Audio/Video Interleaved (AVI) is a Microsoft-developed format for playing full-motion interleaved video and audio sequences in Windows, without specialized hardware.


• AVI provides the following features:
  1. Playback from hard disk or CD-ROM
  2. Playback on computers with limited memory; data is streamed from the hard disk or CD-ROM player without using great amounts of memory
  3. Quick loading and playing, because only a few frames of video and a portion of audio arc accessed at a time
  4. Video compression to boost the quality of your video sequences and reduce their size

Movie Editors

• With Desktop Video Publishing (DVP) software and an appropriate video digitizing board, user can digitize video clips, edit the clip offline, add special effects and titles, mix sound tracks, and save the finished product as a digital file on magnetic or optical media.


• Ex. AVID's Vid-eoShop, Media 100, Fast's VidcoMachine, Adobe's Premiere, and Apple's Final Cut Pro.

Compressing Movie Files

• Compression ratio
  The compression represents the size of the original image divided by the size of the compressed image.


• Image Quality
  
  - Lossy schemes ignore picture information that the viewer may not miss. Will result in image quality decreases.
  - Lossless schemes preserve the original data precisely - an important consideration in medical imaging, for example. The compression ratio typically affects picture quality because usually, the higher the compression ratio, the lower the quality of the decompressed image.


• Compression/decompression speed:
  Users will prefer a fast compression time while developing project. Users, on the other hand, will appreciate a fast decompression time to increase display performance.