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Welcome to my blog on digital communications, im using this blog for my college work as part of my assigments.



Wednesday, 19 January 2011

How Designers Use Digital Video Technology To Enhance A Users Experience

The aim of this essay is to look at the uses of interactive video and technology. In particular the body of this essay will focus mainly on film-trailers and game trailers whilst also looking at other points of digital video technology.


As A fan of the Call Of Duty series since 'COD 4' I’m going to start by addressing the new features for the latest in the series Call Of Duty; Black Ops. Where players are able to record their games and edit them in the theatre room, they can then post them onto www.youtube.com which has caused a flood in video posts onto YouTube with thousands of people uploading their videos as well as others uploading videos giving reviews on their opinion of Black Ops the majority of which are positive mostly focusing the custom options the game allows you to use online such as what camouflage  your gun has, what type of eyepiece the gun has as well as the colour of it players can also customise the face paint and clothing of their character. Giving an all round interactive gaming  experience from start to finish.

one of the official Black Ops trailers, known as ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops Remix feat. Eminem Won't Back Down', which can be viewed here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sg7p5vFAZg&feature=channel
was i believe one of the most popular trailers due to its mainstream features such as the track 'Wont Back Down' from hip hop/rap legend Eminem’s latest album Recovery helped sell the game very well with this trailer as the song ties in very well with all the action scenes of actual game play as well as a few movie clips to combine an adrenaline fuelled trailer aimed at people who enjoy the Call of duty series mostly for its highly praised online multiplayer features.


The main reasons i believe tryarch liked to use trailers to promote black ops is because the target audience tends to be male between the ages of 14 and 26 (even though the game is rated 18+). Therefore this audience isn't as interested in hearing reviews of the games or seeing posters, they want to see actual game play footage and see how realistic the graphics are and how they have changed or improved since the last Call Of Duty game, other advantages of trailers is that you can make as many as you like to appeal to all potential customers, for example one of the main 'hype' features of black ops before it was release was the speculation around the return of the Call Of Duty: World At War Nazi Zombie mini game which was a huge success which generated a healthy profit and is one of the reason the game is still so popular, World At War was also credited as helping to bring back the zombie game franchises. One of the other advantages of using trailers is that they can be freely posted onto www.youtube.com therefore the only cost is for the production and the company can maximise its profits.
to give an idea of how well black ops did i went to www.gamerant.com which stated that: "Call of Duty: Black Ops sells 5.6 Million copies generating $360M in sales, beating Modern Warfare 2′s Day One Sales of 4.7 million." When taken into consideration that Modern Warfare 2, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games is the second best selling game of all time on the Xbox 360 and third best selling on the play station 3, the future is looking bright for black ops.


other companies that have benefited hugely from trailers are those in the film business such as DreamWorks, as well as companies that own the cinemas broadcasting the films such as cineworld who get paid by the film companies to show their film's trailer before you watch your film in the hope you'll go and see there’s to or buy the DVD copy of their film which makes you have to watch roughly 6 trailers for other films before you come to the title menu.

Other ways the film companies are generating profits is by streaming their videos online and selling them or renting them out via the iTunes store.
http://www.netflix.com/ which allows users to pay to view films through their game consoles or pc was critized by http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/03/estimates-on-what-it-costs-netflixs-to-stream-movies.html which estimated that they are paying on average about $0.03 per GB delivered across Limelight and Level 3 and potentially have even a slightly lower rate. Based on the three cents per GB assumption, that means it would cost Netflix about $0.06 to deliver one SD movie and $0.09 to deliver one HD movie. Although you have to taken into consideration that Netflix also has to pay royalties for the rights to show the films, Netflix charges $7.99 a month to let customers stream as many movies as they want.
One popular aspect of films which has returned is 3d effects which came out in the 80s but only recently has the technology been around to give decent affects which resulted in a boom of 3d movies mainly pg and U rated aimed at children, although 3D isn’t limited at children’s films, the Saw franchise latest instalment in the series has been released in 3D probably as a test to see if 3D horror films would be popular. 3D techniques can be created by polarization systems which sends out to images of the same object from different angles when they hit  your 3D glasses which contain polarization lenses to image is given a 3D look to the amazement of the audience.
The next goal for film makers is to try and master 4D (touch and smell) which basically tries to put the audience into the movie for example, you many see an actor walk into a herb store and a machine that releases the smell of some herbs. And by lets say in a horror film the ‘victim’ may be grabbed by the monster by the ankles while that’s happen a machine under the audiences chair would blow air onto the audience’s ankles to try and make them jump. It’s a very popular idea however due to ther cost of having to upgrade the cinemas to allow this kind of technology it hasn’t really taken off.
‘Tipp-ex’ used an interactive placed onto www.youtube.com (which can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ba1BqJ4S2M ) the idea is the hunter doesn’t want to shoot the bed so grabs the Tipp ex from the advert to the right of the video and uses it to erase the word kill and asks you to rewrite the story which, depending on what you type in can have some very interesting consequences.
To date the video has 14,464,810 views and 13,915 likes to 319 dislikes. However not everything you type in will work which may end up with you getting a video of the hunter holding up a sign of  ‘error 404’.
Although this video has become an online sensation with many blogs and online articles dedicated to it.

The Adobe Flash player is a program that lets people view animations and movies on computer programs such as web browsers according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player#Privacy flash  runs .SWF files which can be created using programs such as adobe flash cs4.  The Flash Player was originally designed to display 2-dimensional vector animation, but has since become suitable for creating rich Internet applications and streaming video and audio. It uses vector graphics to minimize file size and create files that save bandwidth and loading time.
Flash is a common format for games, animations, and GUIs embedded into web pages.

Other players such as apples own version known as QuickTime which originally created for Mac computers can be used on Microsoft windows as well as used in iPods and iPads to stream video and .mp3 files as well as .mp4 according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime#File_formats  Other file formats that QuickTime supports natively (to varying degrees) include AIFF, WAV, DV-DIF, MP3, and MPEG program stream. With additional QuickTime Components, it can also support ASF, DivX Media Format, Flash Video, Matroska, Ogg, and many others.



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