Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition

QuickTime is also a file format that is a pervasive Internet standard. QuickTime files, often called QuickTime movies, can combine sound and video in a single file, or hold only sound or only video. QuickTime files can have file name extensions of .qt, .mov, or .moov, with .mov being the most common.

QuickTime files can include the following content, technologies, and capabilities:

• Motion pictures: What you watch on TV or at the movies.

• Digitized sound recordings: Music and other sounds that play in CD-quality sound (44.1kHz, 18-bit stereo).

• Synthesized music: Based on the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard, that takes far less disk space to store than digitized sound, yet sounds realistic and plays in CD-quality.

• Text: For closed-caption viewing, karaoke sing-a-longs, or text-based searches of movie content.

• Sprites: Sprites are graphic objects that move independently, like actors moving on a stage with a motion-picture backdrop.

• MPEG: Movies that use the common MPEG-1 and new MPEG-4 video and audio standards. MPEG-2 playback is an additional component available for a small fee.

• AVI: Movies that are common on Windows. The file type actually covers a broad range of movie codecs. (Although not all varieties of AVI are currently supported by QuickTime — for example, Intel has not ported the Indeo 2.63 codec to the Mac.)

• Graphics: QuickTime 6 includes support for Macromedia Flash 5 and JPEG 2000.

• Panoramas and objects: Permits viewing objects in 360 degrees using QuickTime VR methods.

• Timecode information: Displays elapsed hours, minutes, seconds, and frames at the bottom of a playing movie.

• Functional information: Information that tells QuickTime how other tracks interact.

QuickTime is built into Mac OS X as one of its three graphics technologies (the other two being OpenGL and Quartz). QuickTime makes multimedia ubiquitous in Mac OS X. The Finder lets you view QuickTime files as thumbnails without even opening an application. You don’t need a special application to watch QuickTime movies. Many applications (such as the Microsoft Office applications) let you copy and paste movies into documents as easily as you copy and paste graphics, and you can play a QuickTime movie wherever you encounter one in a document.

QuickTime not only handles time-based and interactive media, but it also extends the Macintosh PICT graphics format, which is the standard graphics format in Mac OS 9 and earlier, to handle compressed still images and image previews. An application that recognizes QuickTime can compress a graphic image by using any QuickTime-compatible software or hardware compressor that is available on your computer. All applications that can open uncompressed PICT images are also capable of opening compressed PICT images. QuickTime automatically decompresses a compressed PICT image without requiring changes to the application program.

What’s in a movie

The motion pictures, sound, and other types of time-based data in a QuickTime movie file exist in separate tracks. A simple movie may consist of one video track and one sound track. A more complex movie may have several video tracks, several audio tracks, and closed-caption text tracks for text subtitles. Each video track can be designed for playback with a specified number of available colors (for example, 256 colors, thousands of colors, or millions of colors), each audio track can provide dialog in a different language (English, Spanish, Japanese, and so on), and each closed-caption text track can provide subtitles in a different language.

If a QuickTime movie contains MIDI-synthesized music, sprites, or a QuickTime VR scene or object, then each item is in a separate track. QuickTime takes care of synchronizing all tracks so that they play at the proper time.

Getting QuickTime software

You get the basic QuickTime software as a part of the standard installation of Mac OS X. You can upgrade to QuickTime Pro, unleashing many additional editing features, for $29.95 by phone (1-888-295-0648) or from Apple’s QuickTime site on the Web (www.apple.com/ quicktime/). In some cases, you can get a free upgrade to QuickTime Pro when you purchase a retail version of the Mac OS or various software packages, such as Final Cut Pro.

What do you get when you purchase an upgrade from the basic edition of QuickTime to QuickTime Pro? The upgrade enables the PictureViewer Pro application to save still images (in BMP, JPEG, Photoshop, PICT, or QuickTime Image format). The upgrade similarly enables the QuickTime plug-in for Web browsers to save movies from the Web.

Moreover, the upgrade brings many improvements to the QuickTime Player application. Here’s some of what QuickTime Player Pro can do that the basic QuickTime Player cannot:

• Create new movies

• Open a sequence of still images as a movie (a slide show)

• Import and export to and from a large number of additional video formats

• Export sound tracks to several additional sound formats

• Apply video and audio compression

• Edit movies by drag-and-drop editing and with Cut, Copy, and Paste commands

• Extract individual tracks from a movie

• Show and set the movie poster frame

• Present a movie centered on a black screen

• Play a movie at full-screen size

• Play a movie in a continuous loop

• Play only the selected part of a movie

• Adjust the size and orientation of each video track in the movie frame

• Show and set the following additional movie, video track, and sound track information

For more detailed information on the differences between QuickTime 6 and QuickTime Pro, visit Apple’s QuickTime Pro Web site at www.apple.com/quicktime/upgrade/.