Data Format Handout

Image File Formats

Digital images are made up of picture elements or pixels (represented on a grid of small squares). RGB (Red-Green-Blue) devices reduce color range to a specific palette (256 colors, thousands or 16 million) and each pixel is allocated the closest color to the original image. The larger the palette size, the closer to the original image. Palette size is specified in bit depth. 256 colors (or greys) is 8 bit, 32 thousand is 16 bit and 16 million is 32 bit. GIFs are 8 bit images, and JPEGs and TIFF can be either 16 or 32 bit.

Cross Platform files: TIFF files [Tag Image File Format:A image file format that runs on a variety of cross-platform applications]

For Director: PICT files [PICT is a common format for defining images on a Macintosh platform]

For the WWW: JPEG (.jpg) [Joint Photographic Experts Group-an organization that has defined various file compressions] and GIF (.gif) []files

Lab Software: Adobe Photoshop, Painter, GraphicConverter, Debabelizer

Recommendations: If you have a detailed image you want to import into the Director project, scan at a higher resolution (150 dots per inch [dpi]) and save as a PICT image. For an image that will be placed on a web page, the dpi can be as low as 72 dpi. I recommend scanning and editing your files in photoshop and saving them as TIFF images. You can then resave them in the proper format in Debabelizer, which does a fantastic job of decreasing file size/format without losing image clarity.

Video Formats
Normal video is 30 frames per second (fps), and is called full motion because it gives the impression of smooth motion. When making a quicktime movie, you may want to keep the frame rate down as well as the size of the viewing window (I recommend 160 X 120 pixels or 320 X 240 pixels for file size as well as the limitations of our Director window which will be 640 X 480 pixels). You will save digitized video in the Quicktime format for our Director project. Bit depth (or color depth) also matters. Smaller bit depth means the file size will be smaller, but the color may not be as rich.

For Director: Quicktime files [Quicktime is software, digital video and system software for the Macintosh]

Lab Software: Adobe Premiere, AfterEffects

Audio Formats

For Director: Audio AIFF (.au) and Wave (.wav) files

For the WWW: Audio AIFF (.au), MIDI and WAVE (.wav) files

Lab Software: SoundEdit 16

Text Formats

You can cut and paste text into Director, or you can import an RTF (Rich Text Format) file.

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Last updated 2.4.97 by Tonya Browning