Digital Video Books

This is a decent if plain-vanilla guide to digital video for beginners. It covers pretty much everything in the realm of home-made movies, from selecting a DV camcorder to shooting clips to capturing video to your PC to editing the final product to publishing. It's primarily a how-to guide, clearly written and illustrated. (The sample video shots are low-quality, though, esp. that ugly black/dark grey cat!) Following the advice in the book will familiarize you with teh tools and techniques, esp. if you are new to video editing. Of course, nothing supplants actually D.I.Y -- doing it yourself. This book provides a good primer and reference.

Such a great book.....It's really hard to find good books on Interaction Design, especially ones that jump out of the interface world, but here it is...great little CD with Mpegs of the projects as well, though the CD itself is not interactive. The mpegs could be of better quality, but no complaints on my end.

This book is very good written, but not all information that you would like to know.

Also was a surprise that book is not in color - don't understand me wrong - i don't mind against black and white, but after such stylish cover - expected smth more.

If you search for book that will show difference from 1st version of program - then it's your book, if you just started to work with Encore - i would recommend you, for example, The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe ® Encore DVD 2.0.

Good projects, everybody!

The authors give a decent introduction to various ways that video streams can be programmatically analysed. Often in order to detect certain images within a stream. A common motivation is to have some type of hierarchical video classification. Previous work by others in the field is summarised. These are tough problems and the book does not make light of them. Often, artificial intelligence is used, via expert systems or knowledge-based techniques.

There is also a summary of audio feature detection and analysis. Generally simpler than the video recognition problem.

The book gives a case study of video classification of the NBC 2000 Sydney Olympics video data. Showing a generally successful analysis.

This book is divided into three parts:

From Perception to Computation - Shows how the physical supports our auditory and visual perceptions. In other words, it shows how acoustic waves and electromagnetic radiation are converted into objects that can be manipulated by a computer.

Machine Learning - Provides a rather deep survey of the main techniques used in machine learning. These chapters cover most of the algorithms applied in systems for audio, image, and video analysis. At this point, all of the algorithms are general pattern recognition techniques that could apply to any field.

Applications - This section presents examples of applications using the techniques presented in part two. There is a chapter each dedicated to speech and handwriting recognition, face recognition, and video segmentation and keyframe extraction. Each chapter shows an overall system where analysis and machine learning components interact in order to accomplish a given task. Whenever possible the chapters of this part present results obtained using publicly available data and software package. This enables the reader to perform experiments similar to those presented in this book.

The beginning of each chapter starts with what the reader should understand before getting started, such as calculus and chapter four in the case of chapter eleven. That is followed with a list of what the reaer should know after reading the chapter. I'd say parts one and two are quite good, but things break down a bit in part three. Granted, the subject of each of the three chapters in the final section is complex, but a few more figures and labeled algorithmic steps and maybe a little less prose might have made the specific matters of each task at hand clearer.

MPEG-21 aims at defining an open framework for multimedia delivery and consumption. MPEG-21 is based on two essential concepts: the definition of a fundamental unit of distribution and transaction (the Digital Item, or DI) and the concept of users interacting with DI's. The DI can be considered the "what" of the Multimedia Framework (e.g., a video collection, a music album) and the Users can be considered the "who" of the Multimedia Framework. The goal of MPEG-21 can thus be rephrased to: defining the technology needed to support Users to exchange, access, consume, trade and otherwise manipulate Digital Items in an efficient, transparent and interoperable way.

The first two chapters of this book are an introduction to MPEG in general and then to MPEG-21 specifically. The discussion of MPEG gives a background of the other MPEG standards - MPEG-1,2,4,and 7. This builds a context for the discussion of MPEG-21. Chapter 3 details the DI and the declaration of a DI using the XML schema-based Digital Item Declaration Language. It explains the elements used within the model and the syntax and semantics of their expressions in XML. Chapter 4 details the "protected" DI that can be created using the Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) Component tools. The chapter details the IPMP metadata that is used to describe the protection mechanism used within a given DI.

With the fundamental unit of transaction, the DI, explained, the next two chapters look at the parts of the standard related to rights. Chapter 5 is a detailed treatment of the MPEG Rights Expression Language (REL). There is an explanation of the creation of licenses using the XML-based REL and there are simple examples to illustrate the usage of the language. Chapter 6 is about the Rights Data Dictionary (RDD), which provides meaning for the metadata-based rights expressions.

Chapters 7 and 8 turn to the subject of data transport and delivery. Chapter 7 shows how DI's can be adapted to user preferences, device characteristics, and natural environments while maintaining effective delivery over a wide variety of networks. Chapter 8 describes a set of XML-based Bitstream Description (BSD) tools that can describe binary streams being delivered. These tools allow a combination of constraints, adaptation, and quality of service measurements to create a custom delivery environment that is suitable for each particular DI under a particular set of circumstances.

Chapter 9 introduces DI processing, in which a DI is made a "smart" item by incorporating Javascript and Java into the DI, thus introducing complex functionality. Chapter 10 is the final technical chapter and deals with event reports. Event reporting is necessary to describe usage of DI's for the purpose of collecting royalties based on usage and distribution. The book ends with a discussion of the future of MPEG-21 in chapter 11.

This book can't help being somewhat academic in style, since MPEG-21 is largely an unimplemented standard at this point. However, where the standards and languages have been pinned down, particularly in the realm of the various XML-based languages and tools, it is very concrete and clear with good examples and figures wherever it is possible. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in the details and possibilities of this standard.

This book does a very good job of explaining all of the descriptors, the mathematics behind them, and the related XML via examples, equations, and good instructive diagrams. The tone is much more accessible and less academic than most books about multimedia standards. However, this should not be your first exposure to audio signal processing. If it is, you will be lost in the portion of the book that describes what all of the descriptors actually mean. Likewise, it should not be your first exposure to MPEG-7. You should already understand the standard to the extent that you know its motivation and its structure somewhat. The other mathematical and scientific concepts discussed in this book include linear algebra topics such as principal component analysis and singular value decomposition, support vector machines, hidden Markov models, automatic speech recognition methods, and music description methods. None of these topics are covered in such detail in this book that this should be your only source. However, if you already understand audio signal processing and have been introduced to the MPEG-7 standard, this is an excellent book to delve deeply into the audio part of MPEG-7. In fact, it is the only one of its kind on the topic. If you want a good book on the MPEG-7 standard as a whole, might I recommend "Introduction to MPEG 7: Multimedia Content Description Language".

For those interested in an example of an implementation of MPEG-7 Audio, type "Java MPEG-7 Audio Encoder" into Google. The first link listed is such a functioning application written in Java that takes an audio file as an input and outputs an XML file consisting of the MPEG-7 audio low level descriptors.

Woods gives a mathematically intensive course in the theory of processing of 2 dimensional images and of video. Roughly the first half of the book is on image processing. Discrete Fourier transforms constitute a large part of this narrative. Space is also given to image reconstruction and enhancement. Not enough room in the book to really cover that thoroughly, but Woods does an ample job of showing simple and effective methods of enhancement.

The second part of the book talks about video processing. And the various encodings possible or necessary, in order to reduce storage to some reasonable size.

MXF is an ambitious idea that has been long overdue in the film and audio industries. It harks to the common problem of how to compress and store films, and do so digitally. There are tremendous advantages in doing so, including the ability to analyse and manipulate such films with ever more powerful software. The enduring problem has been various different compression and storage standards.

The authors describe how an industry wide effort has produced MXF. It certainly took long enough; 5 years! But perhaps the deal was worth the wait. Thumbing through the book, you can see that provision has been made for very flexible inclusion of metadata. A rich format that permits sophisticated file searching based on that metadata.

Plus, there is aid for transitioning between current encodings and MXF. The aim is clearly for MXF to be a global standard.

I just finished viewing the dvd and I'm very surprised at the "in-depth" information included. Even though you might need your camera's manual for a few things, this dvd tutorial covered EVERY aspect of using the D60. The instructor covered all the information needed for me to use any button on this camera and know what I'm doing. I especially like knowing that I can come back to the dvd any time I'm wanting a little refresher on what to do! The little laminated guide that came with this dvd really makes this a good deal! I would recommend this dvd to anyone that is not familiar with this camera.