moving picture

Ads

motion picture

or movie

Series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen. Motion pictures are filmed with a movie camera, which makes rapid exposures of people or objects in motion, and shown with a movie projector, which reproduces sound synchronized with the images. The principal inventors of motion-picture machines were Thomas Alva Edison in the U.S. and the Lumière brothers in France. Film production was centred in France in the early 20th century, but by 1920 the U.S. had become dominant. As directors and stars moved to Hollywood, movie studios expanded, reaching their zenith in the 1930s and '40s, when they also typically owned extensive theatre chains. Moviemaking was marked by a new internationalism in the 1950s and '60s, which also saw the rise of the independent filmmaker. The sophistication of special effects increased greatly from the 1970s. The U.S. film industry, with its immense technical resources, has continued to dominate the world market to the present day. Seealso Columbia Pictures; MGM; Paramount Communications; RKO; United Artists; Warner Brothers.

Learn more about motion picture with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Moving Picture Experts Group

The Moving Picture Experts Group, commonly referred to as simply MPEG, is a working group of ISO/IEC charged with the development of video and audio encoding standards. Its first meeting was in May 1988 in Ottawa, Canada. As of late 2005, MPEG has grown to include approximately 350 members per meeting from various industries, universities, and research institutions. MPEG's official designation is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 WG11.

Standards

MPEG has standardized the following compression formats and ancillary standards:

MPEG-1: Initial video and audio compression standard. Later used as the standard for Video CD, and includes the popular Layer 3 (MP3) audio compression format.
MPEG-2: Transport, video and audio standards for broadcast-quality television. Used for over-the-air digital television ATSC, DVB and ISDB, digital satellite TV services like Dish Network, digital cable television signals, SVCD, and with slight modifications, as the .VOB (Video OBject) files that carry the images on DVDs.
MPEG-3: Originally designed for HDTV, but abandoned when it was realized that MPEG-2 (with extensions) was sufficient for HDTV. (not to be confused with MP3, which is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3.)
MPEG-4: Expands MPEG-1 to support video/audio "objects", 3D content, low bitrate encoding and support for Digital Rights Management. Several new higher efficiency video standards (newer than MPEG-2 Video) are included (an alternative to MPEG-2 Video), notably:

MPEG-4 Part 2 (or Advanced Simple Profile) and
MPEG-4 Part 10 (or Advanced Video Coding or H.264). MPEG-4 Part 10 may be used on HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, along with VC-1 and MPEG-2.

In addition, the following standards, while not sequential advances to the video encoding standard as with MPEG-1 through MPEG-4, are referred to by similar notation:

MPEG-7: A multimedia content description standard.

MPEG-21: MPEG describes this standard as a multimedia framework.

Moreover, relatively more recently than other standards above, MPEG has started following international standards; each of the standards holds multiple MPEG technologies for a way of application. For example, MPEG-A includes a number of technologies on multimedia application format.