Understand Principles of Digital Video Technology in Interactive Media

Designers use digital video technology to enhance a user’s interactive experience on different platforms for online media with two main categories: applications and technologies.
The applications side has a wide variety of uses, starting from media such as short films, promotional material, film trailers and user-generated content all the way to e-learning platforms such as the World Wide Web, email attachments, presentations and mobile devices.
Whereas the technology side focuses more on digital video capture, e.g. digital video file formats (.mpg, .mp4, .mov, .avi, .wmv, .flv etc.) and streaming methods (downloading, progressive downloading and streaming) etc.

User-generated content comes in many varieties and is available in many forms, it can consist of anything from pictures, self-made or taken from a certain category, a game for example, to videos which can also be self-made.
User-generated content can be used to advertise what the creator includes in it, for example, a montage made a video game can be used to advertise the game because it includes what the games like, what’s actually in the game, like maps and weapons, and if the game is popular or not, because if there are a wide variety of montages on the video sharing site that must mean that the game is popular, an example of a video game montage can be found via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlAfpyzPzxM.
Another form of advertising is a type of video called viral this is where a video becomes popular through the process of internet sharing, typically through internet media sharing websites, ‘a video, image or text spread by "word of mouth" on the internet or by e-mail for humorous, political or marketing purposes; Of or relating to a biological virus; Caused by a virus; Of the nature of an informatic virus; able to spread copies of itself to other computers’ quoted from: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=active&biw=1024&bih=643&defl=en&q=define:viral&sa=X&ei=P7E2TenmAYexhQfZqI3HAg&ved=0CBoQkAE, such as YouTube, on YouTube people can upload videos they have made which can then get views, where people view the video, if then the video becomes popular the channel that the user owns will start to get subscriptions where other people on YouTube receive messages on which the persons channel uploads new videos. The video can also be shared on social networking sites by posting the link in a ‘status’, Facebook being the most popular, people then click on the link which take them to the video. This is another form of advertising, it’s called viral advertising where as stated above a video gets spread across the internet via media sharing websites and social networking sites, it could also be called ‘word of mouth’ advertising. This is probably one of, if not the most effective way of advertising for designers and producers because it’s free, and if a friend tells you to watch something you are more than likely going to do it than if a television add comes on the screen and tells you to. ‘With internet advertising consumers are only ever a click away from advertisers' online shops and websites and they can learn about and purchase products 24 hours a day.’ As quoted by http://lbug.co.uk/viral-advertising.html, it also states that ‘Small business can save money due to the reduced need for a sales force, and because of the low production, distribution and residual costs of a viral campaign internet marketing can help a company expand from a local to international marketplace’.
User-generated content can be found to sometimes advertise something without the creator realising, this is because video nearly always have a product in it, whether it being anything from an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 to a piece of music by a famous artist, 30 Seconds to Mars for instance, a good example of this would be a fan made music video to the song ‘This is War’ by the band 30 Seconds to Mars, this video not only advertises the song, but it advertises a video game also, the game being final fantasy, this is because the music video is made up of cut scenes from within the game series, ranging throughout 7 of the games. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV30-5E6Png – The link for the music video)
YouTube is also a catalyst for advertising because some advertisements that were made for television viewing later become banned for some reason or another, but being allowed to put them on YouTube allows the advertisements to then do the job that they were meant to do in the first place, an example of this is a banned Xbox 360 advert that was put on YouTube, although it actually nothing to do with an Xbox it makes you remember the advert which then makes you remember the product. Putting banned advertisements on YouTube or any other media sharing website stops the creator from losing money put into making the advert, but this is only the case if the video gets views, this is a disadvantage to putting adverts on YouTube instead of the television, although its free to do so, the consumer choses to watch it whereas on the TV the only way you can stop yourself from viewing it is by changing the channel.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNuRQmvykwk – The link for the Xbox advert)
 Blogging can also be another form of advertisement because if a blog becomes popular and the page gets ‘followers’ then whatever the author puts on the blog will become advertised, so if the author put on a review of a game for example, it could become well known and encourage people to buy it, whether it’s intentional or not, it’s still another form of advertising. An example of advertisement within a blog would be my own, until now I hadn’t realised it was actually advertising the games I was playing, as it’s a gaming blog. (http://brazzersgametime.blogspot.com/ - The link for my games blog)
Although blogs aren’t very ‘high tech’ due to a YouTube video being the most advanced technology available, on the blogging site http://www.blogger.com/, but this still allows you to advertise videos that have been posted onto YouTube, this could be linked with a self-owned YouTube account for instance because if you had a successful channel then you could advertise the videos that you have posted onto your YouTube channel.
 When using viral videos to advertise, the digital video file format must also be taken into consideration because with each different file format a different level of quality is included and also what the video can be used on, for example an .avi file can’t be used on an iPod. For example if you wanted to post a video onto YouTube the file format doesn’t really matter as it supports most popular formats, ‘YouTube supports a wide variety of the range of video codec formats, audio codec formats and container formats in use.’ As stated on the website: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55744
 The introduction of the new Kinect for the Xbox 360 has changed the way people play games all over the world, not needing a controller to play the games means that the user is more involved in the game, both physically and mentally. Kinect was introduced to broaden the Xbox’s audience beyond its usual ‘hardcore’ gamers and could also help to try and remove the name ‘coach potato’ from the common Xbox gamer. Kinect competes with Wii MotionPlus, PlayStation Move and PlayStation Eye motion control systems for the Wii and PlayStation 3, however both MotionPlus and Move require controllers which are pointed at the screen whereas with Kinect, the user is the controller.
According to www.activate3d.com ‘Kinect uses a special camera to compute the depth of each pixel in addition to the normal red, green, and blue colour information.’ (see, http://activate3d.com/2010/11/how-are-we-different-than-kinect/) it also states that ‘Microsoft took the output depth data and state of the art computer vision research to separate out human beings from the background in the image and break them up into the individual component body parts.’ (also see link above).