Apple Peel

QuickTime Pro 5: From Player to Creator - Part 1

Beginning with version 3.0, every version of QuickTime comes in two flavors: the free-of-charge, bare-bones QuickTime, which basically enables you to play QuickTime movie files, MP3 files and a whole slew of other audio/video file formats, and the more enigmatic “QuickTime Pro” ($29.99US), which provides you with a full set of additional features.

What are those features, and what do they enable you to do that the basic, free-of-charge QuickTime does not? In this new series of articles, we will dig into QuickTime Pro’s feature set and try to highlight some of the most interesting aspects from a “consumer” point of view.

The “Pro” in QuickTime Pro

While it is quite obvious that the “Pro” in QuickTime Pro stands for “Professional” and implies access to a range of features not available in the “consumer-level” QuickTime, its modest price tag ($29.99US, electronic download) is also a clear indication that it certainly doesn’t belong in the same league as real “Pro” applications, such as Apple’s own $999 Final Cut Pro (professional counterpart of the consumer-oriented iMovie) or its $999 DVD Studio Pro (professional counterpart of the consumer-oriented iDVD).

In fact, QuickTime Pro is a product that resists categorizing. It includes features that used to be available free-of-charge as part of the standard QuickTime package and that seem to have been removed from it due to commercial considerations — but it also includes features that actually complement those provided by consumer-level tools such as iMovie and iDVD. It is, in a way, the “missing link” between the passive enjoyment of the Web’s multimedia content and the creative use of Apple’s consumer-level multimedia software.

At the same time, it should be said that, while it cannot compete against professional-level multimedia software, QuickTime Pro offers a very wide range of features that can achieve results that are more than satisfactory, even for the reasonably demanding “creative consumer.”

In this first instalment of our QuickTime Pro series, we will review some of the functionality provided by QuickTime Pro.

Before we start, however, I should specify that I’ll be focusing on the Mac OS X version of QuickTime Pro in these articles (version 5.02). The “classic” version of QuickTime Pro for Mac OS 9 (still available under Classic in Mac OS X as well) is, however, more or less identical — and a registration number purchased for the Mac OS 9 version works for the Mac OS X version as well (and vice versa). In addition, QuickTime Pro is also available for Windows, providing PC users with some of the same functionality.

Saving Movies

The first obvious difference between QuickTime and QuickTime Pro is the ability to save movies. The basic, unregistered QuickTime Player application is a bare-bones affair, with only the required functionality to play compatible audio or video files or experiencing audio or video streams (when they are available in QuickTime format).

When a movie is embedded in a Web page (i.e. shown within the page and not opened with the QuickTime Player application), the right-most button in the control bar under the movie (when it is visible) gives you access to a number of options.

QuickTime Pro plug-in pop-up menu

In this menu, if you own QuickTime Pro (and if the movie in question has not been locked by its author), the two “Save” commands that are normally disabled become available (once the movie is fully loaded) and allow you to save the embedded movie as a QuickTime “.mov” file on your hard drive.

In the QuickTime Player application itself, the difference between QuickTime and QuickTime Pro is obvious when it comes to saving files:


Differences between QuickTime and QuickTime Pro

While the regular “Open” menu only contains commands designed to let you play stuff, the “Open” menu in QuickTime Pro contains additional commands for both opening/importing and saving/exporting.

QuickTime Pro’s “Save As…” command gives you the ability to save the currently active movie file in just two ways: either as a “self-contained” movie, which is what you’ll want in most cases (i.e. as a file that contains the full movie and can be transferred anywhere), or as a very small file (weighing a few kilobytes only) that behaves as a sort of “alias” to the original movie and doesn’t contain the movie itself, but behaves as if it did, using “pointers” to the actual data.

QuickTime Pro "Sav As..." dialog box

To determine if a movie contains any pointers (to other movie files), you need to use the “Get Movie Properties” command from the “Movie” menu (more on this later).

Exporting

The “Export…” command, however, gives you access to an amazingly — and sometimes confusingly — wide array of options.

QuickTime Pro Export formats

Some of these options have to do with converting your QuickTime file into other proprietary formats, such as Microsoft’s own “AVI” video format.

Others, such as “DV Stream”, let you to export your QuickTime file in a format that will enable you to edit the file using other applications. The “.dv” format, for example, is the uncompressed digital video format that is used by iMovie (and Final Cut Pro) to edit movies (cut out sections, add visual effects, etc.).

You can export a QuickTime movie as NTSC (North American) or PAL (European) DV stream, depending on the format used by your video devices. This will, of course, cause QuickTime to blow up your movie image if its size is smaller than the resolution used in these formats. This will also obviously result in a file that’s much larger than the original.

If the exporting takes time, QuickTime Pro will then display a progress bar while the file is being exported, and let you switch to another application while the exporting is taking place.

QuickTime Pro Exporting progress bar

In the example that I have used in my screen captions, the lo-fi version of Apple’s “Rip. Mix. Burn.” ad optimized for slow modem connections has a resolution of 240x180 pixels with a frame rate of approximately 8 fps, for a total size below 1 MB. After exporting is as an NTSC DV stream, the resulting file was a whopping 104 MB, consisting of a DV stream with a resolution of 720x480 pixels and a frame rate of 29.97 fps.

Exported DV file

This step is required, however, if you want to further edit the file with a video editing tool such as iMovie. It obviously only produces satisfactory results with movies that have a good resolution and frame rate to begin with.

Image Sequences

The “Image Sequence” format, in the “Export…” command, lets you save a movie file as a series of image files — for example, a series of 20 JPEG images per second, based on the frames of the original movie.

Exporting image sequence

This can be a useful way to either extract consecutive stills from a movie or decompose the movie into a set of images (all with the same name followed by a number, such as “Movie 01”, “Movie 02”, “Movie 03”, etc.) that can be manipulated individually before re-composing a new movie with the modified set of images.

Indeed, using the “Open Image Sequence…” command, you can then open the first in a series of images that all have the same name followed by a number, and QuickTime Pro will let you set a frame rate (from 30 frames per second to 10 seconds per frame) for the resulting movie, which can be anything from an actual, high-quality video clip to a slide show consisting of each of the pictures displayed for a given number of seconds.

Options for opening image sequence

One small caveat, however: Using the “Open Image Sequence…” command will import your set of pictures right into the currently active “player”, effectively removing its existing content. Make sure that you open a “new player” first if that’s not the behavior you intended. In fact, this is a more general problem with the QuickTime Player interface: sometimes using an “Open” command will cause the Player to open a new “player” window to display the contents of the file you’ve opened, sometimes it will replace the contents of the currently active “player” window with the contents of the file you’ve opened. A more consistent terminology (“Open” vs. “Place”, for example) would be more appropriate.

For fancier slide show effects, such as fade-in/fade-out transitions, you will need to use iMovie — but this “image sequence” functionality is a versatile tool that enables you to create easy-to-distribute slide shows fairly quickly and easily.

Additional Formats and Settings

QuickTime Pro can still export your files in other formats. The ones beginning with “Sound to…” (“Sound to AIFF”, “Sound to Wave”, etc.) are effectively a way to extract the sound track of your movie file — but this form of extraction also performs a conversion at the same time, based on the selected settings.

Options for exporting as sound

In addition to the various sound formats themselves, settings include sampling rate, compressor, etc. (depending on the sound format selected).

The file format called “FLC” is an animation format, while “BMP” is an alternative still image format used in the Windows world. The “Hinted Movie” format is a more specialized format designed to help you optimize your movie file for Internet streaming.

It should be noted that all the file formats available through the “Export…” command come with their own set of additional settings, available in a second pop-up menu called “Use:” below the “Export:” pop-up menu.

Menu of settings for exporting as sound

This menu, whose contents vary depending on the file format selected in the “Export:” pop-up menu above it, gives you access to an array of pre-defined settings for the selected file format, as well as the last settings you used (as “Most Recent Settings”), if you have already exported something using the file format in question.

If none of the settings suggested suit you, then you can use the “Options…” button to access even more options and change each of them individually, in a separate sub-dialog box.

Settings for exporting as movie

This sub-dialog box, whose contents, again, vary depending on the file format selected, can itself span even more dialog boxes with more settings.

More settings for exporting as movie

Even more settings for exporting as movie

Needless to say, it is impossible to illustrate here all the possible combinations of settings that can be accessed through this “Options…” button. The various screen shots in this article are really just the tip of the iceberg — but this cornucopia of settings clearly demonstrates that QuickTime is a very mature piece of software that has been designed to accommodate a whole array of file formats and creative needs.

By purchasing QuickTime Pro, you effectively gain access to all the functionality “hidden” within the apparently simple QuickTime technology, and, in that respect at least, QuickTime Pro fully deserves its “Pro” label.

The only gripe I have with this functionality is that, from a “consumer” point of view, some of the settings are far from being self-explanatory and require that you do some research and a lot of experimenting on your own. The various compressors used for video compression, for example, have names such as “Cinepak,” “H.261,” “Motion JPEG A,” etc. Unless you have done some research, those names are likely to be all Greek to you, and, in order to find out what each compressor does to your movie, you’ll need to experiment with it.

Finally, the other commands included in the “File” menu are common to QuickTime and QuickTime Pro. They let you open a movie on the Web directly by typing its exact URL, and print the current frame.

Next time, we will look further into QuickTime Pro’s editing commands per se, i.e. the commands that let you select, cut, copy, delete and rearrange the various components of a movie file. Stay tuned!

Email Pierre Igot

Pierre's "ApplePeel" page here at Applelust.com

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