Documenting the Process
The documentation shows research, testing and test results. This information is important because it allows you to see the process you went through to get the results you did. It shows the different settings that you used as you exported and how those settings changed the audio, image and video.
The first part of my documentation is research that I did on audio, image and video. The goal for these pages was to find different format types, include what the format stood for and show their different extensions. I also researched the history of the different formats and different applications that you can use for audio, image and video. Where possible I included the file types that the application supported and the import and export options. Below will see my audio section, image and video look pretty similar.
Technology Assessment
For the technology assessment I created my own diagrams to show screen resolutions, storage, bit depth, alias vs anti-alias, raster vs vector and lossy vs lossless. I found this section surprisingly challenging. It was hard to find some of the information for the charts and I didn’t know how to create the comparison images.
Audio
For audio integration I chose to test the song ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ by Green Day. I tested three different file types and changed the bit rate for MP3 and AAC. For WAV I adjusted the sample rate. The goal of testing these different settings was to see how it affected and changed the song. To be specific I was looking at the change in sound and I also recorded what the file size was after the export settings were applied.
For the audio integration I tested five different Taylor Swift songs in iBooks Author. For all five songs I tested AAC and MP3. The goal here was to try and hear the difference between the two versions.
Video
For video compression and evaluation I tested two file types, H.264 and H.265. For both file types I made two changes in the export settings. For H.264 I set the presets to High Quality 1080p HD and High Quality 720p HD. For H.265 I made the presets HD 1080p and HD 720p. Again, the idea was to see how the video changed after applying different export settings.
For video integration I chose some Taylor Swift music videos to download and put into iBooks Author. Two of the videos are for the songs Blank Space and Mine that I did in the audio section. I also did the video You Belong With Me and Shake It Off. For most of these videos there are two of them and they have different export settings. The settings I used are AAC 96K, MP4 480p, and MP4 1080p. I was looking for differences in picture and in sound.
Image
For image compression I took three different images and started with JPEG export settings and then moved to JPEG-2000, GIF and PNG. I was looking for differences in sharpness, color changes and textures. I used Adobe Lightroom for this task.
For image evaluation I used the same images as shown previously. This time I tested different JPEG export settings. The two settings I did were small-90% and full size-50%. I looked at the file size and at the differences on a certain section of the images.
I grabbed hi-resolution images from Google for image integration. I examined how the images looked on my iPad and iPhone when pushed from iBooks Author. I was testing normal images on a page and pop-ups.
At the end of my documentation is a reflection. I have included parts of it below..
This class has made me more knowledgeable in compression and file types which will be good for me as I continue on with design. This class can also be helpful as I go throughout this degree because I can work on making my files smaller while still keeping good quality.
