QuickTime - Tutorials - Audio and Video

Video and audio tracks are the most common forms of QuickTime media tracks. Chances are you’ll spend most of your time working with them.

Inspect and modify video track properties in QuickTime Player’s Info window.

Video tracks
A QuickTime video track can be created from digital video (DV), digitized analog video, a 2D or 3D animation program, or other source capable of generating an image sequence in any of the many file formats importable into QuickTime. Movies can have many video tracks, and the tracks can be edited, layered, and have effects and transitions applied to them. You have complete control over such properties as frame size, frame rate (frames per second), data rate, and video compression.

Make a Picture in picture

Use the Info window of QuickTime Player to inspect and change many video track properties, such as movie size and graphics mode. A basic compositing trick is to add a small picture-in-picture video to the corner of your movie. This requires two video tracks.

• Open Movie 1, the one in which you will insert the smaller picture-in-picture video.

• If the picture-in-picture video is in a separate movie (Movie 2), open Movie 2, select the frames that will become the picture in picture, and copy them.

• If the picture-in-picture video is in Movie 1, extract the video track. This will create a new movie with that video as the sole media track. Select the frames that will become the picture in picture, and copy them.

• In Movie 1, select the frames where you want the picture-in-picture to appear.

• Choose Add Scaled from the Edit menu (QuickTime 4 users can Add Scaled by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Shift or Option-Shift, then selecting Add Scaled from the Edit menu) to paste the picture-in-picture video onto the selected area of Movie 1. This adds a second video track to Movie 1.

• To make the picture-in-picture video track smaller while keepings the same aspect ratio, open the Info window, select Video Track 2, and modify the Size property from the right-hand Properties pop-up. Choose Select All, then Shift-drag one of the red corner handles.

Audio tracks
A QuickTime audio track contains digitized sound samples. These can be an MP3, an audio CD track or sampled analog tape recording, or from any other audio source that can generate a sound file compatible with QuickTime (and most are). Audio quality ranges from high (16-bit, 44.1 kilohertz, uncompressed) to low (8-bit, 22 kilohertz, highly compressed). As with video tracks, you can edit audio tracks and layer one audio track on top of another to build a complex audio experience.

Video Compression
Video compression is necessary to make your movies play at full speed on most computers or to be small enough to view on the web. QuickTime supports a wide range of codecs (compressors-decompressors), both lossless (high quality, large files) and lossy (lower quality, small files). To see your codec options, export your movie (using Export... in the File menu) as a QuickTime movie, choose Options... and then Video Settings... . The Apple Sorenson codec is recommended as a high-quality lossy codec for video and rendered animation.

Music tracks
QuickTime also supports a separate audio track type called a music track. This is actually a MIDI (Musical Instruments Digital Interface) track that contains, not digitized audio, but note information played with a virtual instrument. QuickTime includes its own selection of high-quality MIDI instruments. MIDI delivers long and complex pieces of music using small files and little bandwidth.

Audio compression
QuickTime offers a variety of sound and music compressors. QDesign’s Music Codec is recommended for its high quality and small-size files.

Special Effects, Transitions, and Filters
QuickTime includes fifteen video filters for such visual effects as blur, edge detection, emboss, film noise, HSL balance, RGB balance, and sharpen; thirteen basic video transitions, including cross-fade, explode, gradient wipe, implode, push, slide, and wipe, each with several variations, and ripple, fire, clouds, and glass effects. These are applied through the Info window to the selected range of frames. The QuickTime Effects Architecture is fully open and extensible, so that you can write your own filters.

Home > QuickTime > Products > Tutorials > QuickTime Tracks