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Introduction to Digital Media

Stay at the cutting edge of today’s modern media world by exploring fundamental digital media processes and technologies. Learn online with the Communication University of China.

Duration

6 weeks

Weekly study

4 hours

100% online

How it works

Unlimited subscription

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Upskill for new media industries with digital technologies

From Metaverse to VR, Netflix to mobile applications, we’re surrounded by and interact with digital networks more than ever before. But what’s driving this digital revolution and how can you harness these transformative technologies?

On this six-week, digital media course from the Communications University of China (CUC), you’ll uncover the processes behind digital content and learn to build digital media applications for our interconnected world.

Explore digital image, video, and audio

You’ll first explore the primary differences between digital and traditional media to understand why digital formats dominate today.

You’ll also unpack processes and technologies behind popular digital formats, from creating digital images through encoding to storing and transmitting digital video, and how digital audio technology enables recording, editing, and playback.

Discover common data compression formats

With this foundational knowledge, you’ll then understand the purpose of data compression in optimising digital media.

You’ll explore how coding technologies can more efficiently store and transmit images and video, and how different audio compression methods, such as lossy and lossless techniques, balance file size and sound quality.

Delve into computer graphics, animation, and games

Next, you’ll explore popular digital formats, learning how graphics are represented and processed, how 3D models power animation, and how game engines accelerate game development.

You’ll also examine the role of computer vision and information visualisation in understanding and presenting data across various fields, from tracking objects with computer vision to using big data and visualisation in industries like finance, biology, and e-commerce.

Week 1
Digital image and video
- What is digital media technology?
  Compared with traditional media, digital media has the advantages of interactive and fast transmission through the network.
- Digital image technology
  A digital image is an image obtained by digitizing an analog image, with pixels as basic elements, and can be stored and processed by a digital computer or digital circuit.
- Digital video technology
  Digital video is video recorded in digital form, as opposed to analog video. Digital video has different ways of generation, storage and broadcasting.
Week 2
Digital audio
- Fundamentals of digital audio technology
  Digital audio is a technology that uses digital means to record, store, edit, compress or play sound.
- Digital speech processing
  Digital speech processing mainly studies the speech production process, the statistical characteristics of speech signals, automatic speech recognition, machine synthesis and speech perception.
- Typical applications of digital speech processing
  Speech recognition technology is a technology that enables machines to understand and recognize human speech. It has a wide range of application scenarios in many fields.
Week 3
Digital media compression
- Intruduction to data compression
  Without losing useful information, reducing the amount of data can reduce storage space and improve its transmission, storage and processing efficiency.
- Digital image compression
  Since the amount of image data is huge, it is very difficult to store, transmit and process, so digital image compression is very important.
- Digital video compression
  Encoding and compressing the original video can remove redundancy in spatial and temporal dimensions.
- Digital audio compression
  Digital audio compression compresses the audio data signal as much as possible while ensuring that the signal does not produce auditory distortion.
Week 4
Computer graphics and animation
- Computer graphics
  Computer graphics mainly studies how to represent graphics in computers, and how to use computers to calculate, process and display graphics.
- Computer animation
  Unlike traditional animation techniques which use frame-by-frame animation of 2D illustrations, computer animation generates continuous image frames by building 3D models.
- Computer game
  The emergence of various game engines has greatly facilitated game developers. They can provide game designers with various tools needed to write games, allowing game designers to easily and quickly create game programs.
Week 5
Computer vision and information visualization
- Overview of computer vision
  Computer vision refers to the use of cameras and computers to identify, track and measure targets instead of human eyes.
- Visual big data
  Visual data information has more mixed characteristics than other big data information, so the authenticity of the data is particularly important.
- Information visualization
  Information visualization is the application of visualization technology in the field of data. Information visualization technology is widely used in various fields such as finance, network communication, biology and e-commerce.
Week 6
Digital media network
- Digital media storage
  Data storage refers to saving media data on certain media in a reasonable, safe and effective manner according to different application environments and ensuring effective access.
- Digital media transmission
  Transmission media is also called transmission medium or transmission medium. It is the physical path between the sender and the receiver in the data transmission system.
- Digital media network security
  With the advent of the digital age, the information security and protection of digital content have become topics of extensive research by many scholars.