Manic Compression

After a busy week of self study which involved much amended time planning, I was looking forward to coming into college to crack on with my assignments. On Wednesday morning, I arrived to find that my group had been decimated into the singular, so for the mornings lecture on colour I only had myself for company. During the lecture, I came across a lot of familiar terms, most of which was new to me. I found this theory more interesting than last weeks, as it contained lots of pretty colours, and I’m arty like that.

During the afternoon, we continued with our project work. As I had no one to be distracted by, or rather, I had no one to distract, I made progress with the A3 assignment. For this, I planned out exactly what I wanted to say in my comparative analysis. I have learned since the first assignment that you should get all your thoughts together, re-edit them, and then write your piece. This will reduce the stress and swearing associated with editing type while it is in the PageMaker template.

During Wednesday night, I had to design a logo for a project my Mum was doing for her computing Masters course. I had to create some logo designs in Photoshop so that she could show them to the client she was working for. As her course is based around the technical aspects of coding, it was OK for me to create the graphical parts of the project. One of my designs can be seen below. It proved to be a ‘nice little earner’, as my Mum agreed to pay my petrol money from now until Christmas. I think I may suddenly develop a taste for going on long drives.On Thursday morning, we had a lecture on file compression. I was fairly familiar with some terms, such as RLE as I use it for saving my motorsport skins. However, I use a targa (.tga) format, where you can enable or disable the RLE compression. I find that it reduces the file size to about 40% of its uncompressed .tga size. I also save in 32-bit (yes, it does exist, it is a 24-bit true colour image with an 8-bit alpha channel) so file compression is even more important.

Other features of the lecture, such as an explanation of how some compression formats works were very interesting, as I not encountered the technicalities of this before. This will certainly help with the A4 assignment on image compression, as I can now create a hypothesis and test to see if it is correct.

The A4 assignment could commence after we had done the lecture. I was looking forward to this up till this point, but then it slowly dawned on me that it was going to be a logistical nightmare. With so many things to comment on, and so many picture files to assemble, it is going to take a lot of work to get right. However, during our group’s feedback meeting Steve clarified a lot of issues which we were uncertain about and we could make progress in the remaining afternoon.

Over the weekend, I fuelled my latest fascination, which is creating movie in Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. This made the weeks lectures even more relevant, as I had been working with compression programs, uncompressed files, and codecs. For a 4.01 minute video, the uncompressed file was a staggering 794mb file. This was obviously far too bit, so again, using Jodix, I managed to compress the file into .mp4. The resolution of the video was kept the same, but the file size certainly was not. The final file weighed in at a featherweight total of 60.5mb. That is a 92% reduction in file size, with very little loss in quality. This just goes to prove that file compression is the king when it comes to making fast loading websites. The movie can be seen below.