Apple Peel

QuickTime Pro: From Player to Creator - Part 2

IMPORTANT NOTE – This article is the second part in a special series on Apple’s QuickTime Pro software. The first part is available here. As noted last time, in this article I’ll be focusing on the Mac OS X version of QuickTime Pro. The “classic” version of QuickTime Pro for Mac OS 9 (still available under Classic in Mac OS X as well) is 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.

In this second part, we will look more closely at QuickTime Pro’s movie editing features. While they are no match for the functionality provided by more advanced tools such as iMovie or Final Cut Pro, they constitute a basic set of tools available at a price that is hard to beat.

From Player to Editor

Just like QuickTime Pro’s “Open” menu was vastly different from its counterpart in the basic version of the QuickTime Player (see previous article), QuickTime Pro’s “Edit” menu includes many more additional commands beyond the basic set of commands offered in QuickTime Player:


“Edit” menu in QuickTime Player (basic and Pro versions)

Even the basic set of commands, however, only seem to be the same. While both menus include the traditional “Copy”, “Cut”, and “Paste” commands, their effect is not the same. To explain this, we need to look at another aspect of the QuickTime Player interface: the selection bar, i.e. the part with the beige background located under the movie area in a QuickTime Player window.

The Selection Bar

In the basic version of QuickTime Player, this bar only includes one type of widget: the down-pointing black triangle above the bar, which ends in a vertical line that slides across the bar as the movie is playing or when you move the arrow yourself with your cursor. Moving this pointer enables you to indicate where you want movie playback to begin.

The Selection Bar in the basic Player

In QuickTime Pro, the bar also includes two smaller, up-pointing triangles below the bar, which Apple calls the “selection markers.” As the name indicates, they enable you to select a portion of the movie. The selected part (between the two markers) is indicated in grey.

Selection in QuickTime Pro Player

Now, you will have noticed that, in the picture of the basic selection bar above, there is also a grey area. Indeed, the basic QuickTime Player also allows you to select a portion of the movie, but not with selection markers. In order to select a portion of a movie, you just shift-click-and-drag in the selection bar.

I am not quite sure what the purpose of this is, however. It seems that it might be a way to indicate which portion of the movie you want to play. Yet, when playing a movie with such a selection, the pointer happily continues past the boundaries of the selection. Indeed, the “Play Selection Only” option available in the “Movie” menu under QuickTime Pro is not available in the basic player. If anyone knows what the purpose of selecting a portion of a movie in the basic QuickTime Player is, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Selecting a portion of a movie in the basic QuickTime Player does not enable you to copy and paste it somewhere else. Indeed, while the “Copy” command is available in QuickTime Player when a movie is open, all it does is “copy” the current frame of the movie as a still image, which you can then paste into any application.

In the Pro Player, however, the selection is set separately from the pointer, using the selection marks below the selection bar. And this selection indicates the portion of the movie file that will be copied to the clipboard using the “Copy” or “Cut” command. You can thus easily rearrange portions of a movie by cutting and pasting them around, just like you’d do with text in a word processor.

This is, obviously, a rather crude approach to movie editing, and lacks somewhat in the accuracy department. (It’s not always easy to select the exact portion you want to cut and paste.) QuickTime Pro doesn’t have a “zoom-in” sort of command that would enable you to view the sequence of frames in slow motion and select exactly the first frame and the last frame of your selection. But it works fairly well for simple editing tasks.

Multiple Tracks

The true power of QuickTime Pro, however, lies in its ability to edit the multiple tracks that constitute a movie in QuickTime format.

In its most basic form, a QuickTime movie is a single video track with or without a sound track. (Many sound file formats such as AIFF, MP3 and WAV are also supported by QuickTime, which means that, technically speaking, you can also have a QuickTime Player window open with only a sound track in it. If all you want to do is edit audio tracks, however, QuickTime Pro is not the preferred option. There are several shareware audio editors that will do a much better job and have many more options — some of which you might want to use in combination with QuickTime Pro when editing a movie with a sound track. My editor of choice is the very powerful and super-slick Amadeus II.)

With QuickTime Pro, however, you can actually access those tracks individually and add tracks, delete tracks, enable tracks, etc. All these track-related commands are accessed through the “Edit” menu.

If we take our movie above, for example, having copied a portion of a movie to the Clipboard, instead of just pasting it somewhere else in the movie (which will add to the length of the movie), you can “Add” it starting where the pointer is located. This will effectively create a second video track in your movie file, containing the portion you had in your Clipboard. You can then enable or disable each video track individually through the “Enable Tracks,” by clicking on the “ON”/”OFF” box.

Enable Tracks dialog box

For those familiar with the “Layers” concept used throughout Adobe’s product line (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.) and other software products by other companies, the concept of “tracks” is rather similar. “Disabling” a track effectively hides it without removing it from the movie file, which means that it is stored, but not played during movie playback.

“Extracting” a track effectively opens a new movie player with a single track consisting of the video track selected in the “Extract Track” dialog. It should be noted, however, that, when the selected track does not span the entirety of the original movie length, QuickTime Player extracts a video track that begins at the very beginning of the original movie (even if the selected video track doesn’t begin until later on) and ends with the last frame of the selected track. For example, if you have a 3-second video track that goes from second 30 to second 33 of a 60-second movie, extracting that video track creates a new player with a video track that is 33 seconds in length and includes 30 seconds of nothing (solid gray frames in QuickTime Player) before the beginning of the extracted video track.

Info on extracted track in new Player window

Deleting a track does just that, i.e. remove the selected track from your movie file, while leaving the rest of your movie file intact.

The analogy with Photoshop and other “layered” applications is only superficial, however. QuickTime Pro’s manipulation tools are nowhere near those of such professional-level applications in terms of flexibility. For example, it is not possible to change the order of the video tracks in the “Enable Tracks” dialog, so that one displays in front of or is hidden by the other. (Lower tracks in the list of tracks are played in front.) In order to achieve such a thing, i.e., for example, to change the order of track 1 and track 2, you need to extract track 2 to a new player, then extract track 1 to another player, then select track 1 in that other player, and then “add” track 1 to the player containing track 2 (which is now track 1 in this new player), thus making it track 2 (in front) in the new player. (So much for trying to describe video manipulation with simple words.)

It would also be useful if QuickTime had a tool that enabled you to select a track that doesn’t span the entirety of your movie with perfect accuracy. As it is, you have to drag the selection markers manually and attempt to place them exactly on the first frame and the last frame of the track in question. This is, of course, because the selection bar is an all-purpose tool that doesn’t apply to a specific track, but to the movie as a whole (as a combination of tracks).

Regardless of those shortcomings, all this still means that you can fairly easily manipulate video and audio tracks (as well as other types of tracks, which we will touch upon below and in the third part of this article) with QuickTime Pro. You won’t achieve pro-level accuracy, but basic manipulations are accessible.

QuickTime Pro also includes the option to add a track that has a different picture size while adjusting its picture size to fit the movie to which it is being added. If, for example, you want to add a video track whose picture size is 200x150 pixels to a movie file whose picture size is 400x300 pixels, you can use the “Add Scaled” command in the “Edit” menu to get QuickTime Pro to automatically scale your 200x150 video track up to 400x300 pixels (which will obviously require a certain amount of interpolation).

Adding a Text Track

Since the last two commands of the “Edit” menu (“Find” and “Find Again”) are only available if your movie file contains a text track, now is as a good time as any to explore that particular feature a bit further.

In order to create a text track for a QuickTime movie, you can start by typing lines of text in a text editor such as BBEdit. Each paragraph of text (separated from the next by a return character) will be used as the basis for one frame of the text track in QuickTime. Save this file as “text only” and return to QuickTime. In my example, I am going to use a text file called “text track sample.txt” which contains the following lines of text:

Text file in BBEdit for text track

I then use the “Import…” command in the “File” menu to import this text file as a text track. QuickTime will automatically convert the text file into a new QuickTime movie consisting of one text track in which each line of text appears as a frame of white text on a black background that plays for a default duration of two seconds before switching to the next frame.

Text file imported into QuickTime Pro as text track

I could already use this rather crude text track in my movie, by selecting it in its entirety, copying it to the Clipboard and using the “Add” command in the “Edit” menu to add it as a track to my existing movie file. I would then end up with a movie that looks something like this:

QuickTime movie with added text track

which is obviously not a masterpiece of video design. However, QuickTime Pro’s capabilities go much further. If you want to customize your text track before adding it to your movie, you should use the following procedure: from the QuickTime Player containing the text track by itself, use the “Export…” command from the “File” with the “Text to Text” format option selected, and click on the “Options…” button for that exporting format.

Options for exporting text track as text file

QuickTime will then create a new text file, which I’ve chosen to call “text track rich.txt,” and which looks something like this:

New text file with extra text descriptors

As you can see, QuickTime has added all kinds of tags or “text descriptors” with various settings that I can now change manually to things of my liking, such as a new font, a different background colour, etc. By simply re-importing the new text file as a text track in QuickTime, I can now obtain a text track that is closer to my intention:

New text file with modified descriptors re-imported in QuickTime as text track

Admittedly, it still is far from being a masterpiece of video design, but it should give you an idea of the possibilities. I don’t have enough room, unfortunately, to explore all the possible formatting options here. For further information, you should consult Apple’s own extensive on-line QuickTime documentation. A good starting point is this page on QuickTime tutorials. The meaning and use of the so-called QuickTime “Text Descriptors” is described on this page. There are myriads of options, all accessible with QuickTime Pro and a simple text editor.

Once you have a movie with a text track (either your own or someone else’s), then you may use the “Find” and “Find Again” commands in the “Edit” menu to browse through the movie using keywords in the text of the text track.

Conclusion

Here again, through the exploration of the “Edit” menu in QuickTime Pro, we have come to the realization that this affordable movie editing tool gives you access to a wide range of options that go well beyond the very basics of movie editing. While QuickTime Pro will never be a match for professional tools, those tools cost hundreds of dollars, and QuickTime Pro’s feature set is well worth examining as a first step in your exploration of digital video on the Mac.

Next time, we will take a look at QuickTime Pro’s other menus, including “Movie,” “QTV” and “Window.” Stay tuned!

applepeel@applelust.com

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