When I first switched over from Windows, I carried over VLC and Firefox as my safety blanket. This was back when people in India had not even heard of the iPod, so Macs were like [unknown]. Within a few weeks of getting used to the Mac however, I haven’t used either as my main application for over three years now. Safari, for obvious reasons. It’s much better than Firefox. Quicktime on the other hand doesn’t seem like something usable at first. The lack of out of the box playback capabilities, and the extremely minimalistic look, coupled with the “PRO” stickers riddled throughout the menubar, Quicktime is a mess to start with.
Around the time of Leopard’s release, Apple made Quicktime’s fullscreen ‘feature’ non-pro. This means everyone can actually watch a movie using the build in player. Sure iTunes was already there, but having to save them as iTunes friendly movies before viewing meant I’d better had watched them in Quicktime in the first place.
The big question of course, is whether to go Pro. Can Apple really justify you paying $30 for a movie player? Now that Snow Leopard may or may not feature Quicktime Pro as standard, I thought I’d discuss what Quicktime really stands for.
Media Playback
Quicktime can playback almost anything. Using the Perian plugin, you can play AVI, MKV, Flash video, and more. It’s an all-encompassing plugin really. In addition to Perian, you can use Flip4Mac to play WMV files as well. Front Row and Quicktime both use the quicktime engine for playback, so you will definitely need to install those codecs.
Export and Convert
Quicktime can be used to convert video from any of the playback formats to H264, Mpeg, DV, and some other formats. It features one step options for exporting to iPhone or AppleTV. You can of course edit any of these exporting presets to change codec settings, quality, and a whole lot of other options. It may not be as robust as a professional or geeky encoder, but it’s good enough. You can use the Export to Web option to quickly get media on the web.
One thing I like, and for no apparent reason, is the ability to export a video as an image sequence. It will render all the frames of the movie as a separate PNG file. I have never had any use for this, but having it there is somewhat reassuring. Note that to take a single screenshot of your movie, all you need to do is use your mouse to drag the ‘picture’ on to your desktop. It saves it as an MOV file instead of a PNG, but it’s nice when all you’re looking for is a quick snapshot of that video frame.
One other feature is saving any movie inside the quicktime container. Just hit File » Save, and save it as a Quicktime Movie. Why would you do this? So that you can add it to iTunes. It’s better to organise movies in there, as well as see the artwork fluttering around while in Front Row. If you don’t like to wait for each movie to save, save the movie as a “Reference File”. This is a tiny file, that points to the source, but can be dropped into iTunes.
Note that with Saving, you are only encapsulatng existing video data in the QT container. This content cannot be played on the iPhone or AppleTV which requires the video to be in the Mp4 spec, which means you have to export the file and bear the long hours of encoding video.
Controlling your video
One of the little known features of Quicktime, is the A/V controls HUD. This simple HUD allows you to control brightness, colour, pitch shift, all of which is reflected in realtime.
One of the slickest features in this HUD however, is the Jog Shuttle. Dragging the slider forward or backward dynamically changes the speed at which you go backward or forward. Just try it out!
Accessing Movie Properties
The movie properties window will show you each of the different tracks within the video file. It separates your audio, video, and subtitle tracks so you can change those individual elements to suit your playback. For instance, if you don’t want a subtitle track to play, just uncheck it from the tracklist. If there’s multiple audio tracks in a video file, you can set the preference.
If you delve a little deeper, you’ll find that the options at the bottom change according to the track type. For video, you can overlay a mask (like for instance, video within text), change the display size, flip the video, rotate, etc., all in real time. When it comes to Audio, if you have a multi channel speaker set up, you can adjust the speaker assignment, and change a few other properties. If you want these changes to be saved, just save it as a Quicktime movie or Reference file so you don’t have to do it the next time.
One last bit you can do here, is Extract any of these tracks. Most common usage is to extract the audio from some video file. Just select the track, hit Extract at the top, and it will create a new movie with only that stream showing. You can then save that movie or audio track as a separate file.
Cutting, hacking, forging
Using Quicktime you can hack and split your way through videos. For instance, if you want to save a funny bit from a movie, just move the track headers to the start and finish of your required length, and hit Edit » Trim to selection. If you’re finding it difficult to select frames from a large video, just narrow down to the approximate area, and then you can better adjust the clippers.
If you want to join a series of videos, all you need to do is open the last video first, and then drop in the clips in a descending order. Yes, it weirdly enough goes the other way round. Once you’re done you can just hit File » Save or Export. You can also take a bunch of images and make them into a quicktime movie sequence. Those high FPS dSLR sequence shots for instance would do great for an ultra high definition video file!
Chaptering your video is a really complex process, but it’s great if you’re doing a long video interview, or something that requires breaks. I won’t go into details of adding chapters, as Apple already has a guide that you can follow. Honestly though, Apple ought to make chaptering a much easier process.
Marking Favourites
A hardly used feature, favourites allows you to bookmark your movies in a single location. It’s not such a great feature, one that you can rave about to your Windows buddies, but it’s helpful in certain scenarios. I use it to save those home made clips, or some funny bit which I always show when friends arrive. All it takes for adding a favourite is hitting Cmd+D with the movie selected. There isn’t even a confirmation box!
Recording Audio and Video
While Photo Booth allows you to record video, I can never trust it. More often than not, it will not record the sound (is that default behaviour?). Using Quicktime Pro you can start an audio or video recording, and then capture it at the native quality possible with your device. You can go to the QT preferences to change the audio/video source as well as the quality you record in. The files are automatically saved to your desktop so you don’t lose it by accident.
Quicktime Pro
So, is it worth the upgrade? For $30 I think QT Pro is well priced. It’s got some good features, minimalistic interface, and comes in handy in times of need. That said, Apple needs to be less greedy and bundle this along with new Macs. iLife certainly comes along that way, why shouldn’t QuickTime? Hopefully, Apple will include QT Pro along with Snow Leopard, and the world will be a better place.
You a Quicktime Pro user?
