Multimedia File Formats

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General Comments

Including complex multimedia objects in an ETD is a relatively new possibility. Those attempting this are pioneers. You are encouraged to work with those on your committee interested in this to gain their approval and assistance. Ultimately they should check your final submission, and should be prepared and agree to do so with the multimedia part, else you may think about putting your multimedia work into some other document (e.g., report, WWW site).

It is likely that complex multimedia objects will each reside in a different file, located in the same directory as the rest of your ETD. You may wish some icon or thumbnail or other small form of the complex multimedia object in the body of your ETD, and to have that linked to the complex multimedia object.

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Archiving

Be careful to consider issues of long-term archiving.

• Always include the highest resolution version of your object, not just a version suitable for today's devices, since technology may improve. You can include several versions, to help those with a variety of devices, particularly if the media itself is not scalable. For example, scan a slide at 2700dpi, but have 640x480 and 320x240 versions as well.

• If you can, include a version using a well-accepted international standard. Thus, for video, MPEG is encouraged. If you start with QuickTime, include that, but also include MPEG if possible.

• If you use some proprietary software, include a viewer if that is allowed by the vendor. That way people can view your object without buying that software. Realize, however, that in a few years this object may not be readily usable due to changes in versions and technology.

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To Learn More

To learn more about multimedia, you may want to take a course in Multimedia, Hypertext and Information Access.

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Acceptable File Formats

• Thesis Body
• PDF Portable Document Format

• Text
• ASCII (.txt)

• Images
• PDF (.pdf) use Type I PostScript fonts
• JPEG (.jpg)
• CompuServe GIF (.gif)
• TIFF following version 6.0 or later, including CCITT G4 (.tif)
• CGM Computer Graphics Metafile (.cgm)
• PhotoCD

Note: We recommend a minimum of 600 dpi resolution for images of pages with text.

• Video
• MPEG (i.e., MPEG-1, MPEG-2) (.mpg)
• QuickTime - Apple (.mov)
• Audio Video Interleaved - Microsoft (.avi)

• Audio
• MPEG-2
• CD-DA
• CD-ROM/XA (A or B or C)
• AIF (.aif)
• SND (.snd)
• WAV (.wav)
• MIDI (with timing information) (.midi)

• Authoring
• Authorware
• Director (MMM, PICS)

• Special
• Spreadsheet - Excel (.xcl)
• AutoCAD (.dxf)

• Referring
• "handles" as URNs (URLs don't last very long)
• ISBN, ISSN

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Back to Guidelines

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multimediafile.html Revised June 14, 2000