Glossary » M

Media Access Control Address. A unique identifier assigned to network devices.

Close-up mode which instructs the camera lens to focus as close as possible. Macro capabilities vary considerably between different cameras, and cannot be judged on closest focussing distance alone. Some may not focus particularly close, but might allow the lens to zoom-in for a better result. Others focus very close, but lock the lens at its widest position. Macro can also refer to an automated procedure programmed in an application. Macros are often employed in packages like Word and Excel.

Mega Byte - one million bytes

Mega Bit - one million bits

Quality of a digital camera in terms of resolution. Multiplies the horizontal and vertical number of pixels on the imaging chip to give one figure, typically in the millions. This figure is then divided by a million to give a megapixel rating.

Any of several formats and specifications of miniature plastic card, containing various capacities of non-volatile, ‘flash’ memory. These cards are used primarily for storing images in digital cameras, or music in portable music players.

Tiny hard disk squeezed into a slightly thicker Type-II+ Compact Flash card. Not all devices with Compact Flash cards can use the Microdrive though, due to physical and electrical characteristics including the increased thickness.

A proprietary tape standard used by some Sony camcorders. Uses MPEG2 compression.

Multum in Parvum is Latin and means “many in one”. MIP map levels refer to the regions of a rendered scene that are using MIP maps of a similar level of detail (LOD). Without advanced filtering techniques, MIP map levels appear as concentric rings of decreasing detail expanding from the viewpoint. Trilinear filtering or better is needed to effectively blend adjacent MIP map levels.

A video compression technique where each frame is compressed separately and stored as a sequence of JPEG images. Not as efficient as MPEG2, but often found in high end systems.

The ability to create a fully animated change sequence based on a start, a finish and possibly one or more intermediate key frames. An example would be to change the expression on a character’s face based just on a start and finish expression and have the hardware create the frames in-between.

A complex compression technique that stores data as a series of different frames known as I-, B- and P frames. I frames contain a complete set of image data, while B- and P frames contain subsets that refer to preceding and successive frames to create a complete frame. An efficient data compression routine, but not suited to frame accurate editing due to the amount of cross-referring required to build a single video frame. MPEG2 is used for DVD encoding and also found in MicroMV and DVD-VR camcorders.

In simple terms this is a more efficient way of performing anti-aliasing than Supersampling is. Bandwidth for both methods is the same although Multisampling is faster than Supersampling due to the way it handles colour data.

This is the process of adding more than a single texture to a surface. The additional texture or textures may contain lighting information or information required for bump mapping the original texture.