QuickTime - Tutorials

Text can play an important role in your movies. It can serve as titles, subtitles, credits, teleprompter text, or the complete content of the movie (as in an all-text commercial). A text track is also used to contain information for chapter tracks and HREF tracks.

A text track is very low bandwidth, so it costs little to add one to your movie. Moreover, because text tracks are in vector form, you can resize the movie (by dragging at the lower right corner) and the text will still appear perfectly smooth. So it makes sense to use a text track any time you need text, and not to use a bitmap text image created in, say, Adobe Photoshop.
You can specify text font, color, size, and style; apply drop shadows; make text scroll or crawl across the screen; and overlay it onto a video track. Text in a movie is also randomly searchable by the viewer.


		Create a text movie To create a text movie, you need any word processing application that can generate a standard ASCII plain text file. A formatted word processing document won’t work. SimpleText works fine for this.
		First, type out the text and save it as a text-only file.
		In QuickTime Player, create a new movie by choosing New from the File menu.
		Choose Import... from the File menu and select the text file.
		Click Convert to convert the file to a text movie. Click the Options... button to set parameters like text style, text and background color, drop shadow, antialiasing, and whether you want QuickTime Player to autofit the text (recommended for best results). If you are layering text over video, check the Keyed Text box. That makes the background color of the text track transparent.
		Save as a movie and play it: the text is perfectly laid out as a series of text-only slides. QuickTime creates one video frame (or slide) for each paragraph of text.

Edit text with Descriptors
You may want to change the text timing, set special attributes, or do other modifications to the track. You can do that with QuickTime’s text formatting tags, called text descriptors. Here’s how:

Choose Export... from the File menu. Set the Export popup to Text to Text and set the Use: popup to Text with Descriptors. Click Save to create a text file with descriptors.

{QTtext} {font:Geneva} {plain} {anti-alias:on} 
                  {size:12} {textColor: 65535, 65535, 65535} {backColor: 0, 0, 
                  0} {justify:center} {timeScale:1000} {width:160} {height:48} 
                  {timeStamps:absolute} {language:0} {textEncoding:0} 
                  
[00:00:00.000] 
Your text your text your text 
                  
[00:00:02.000] 
More text more text more text 
                  
[00:00:04.000] 
More text more text more text

Open the file in any word processor. You’ll see your original text with descriptors added. It will look something like the text at the left.

The descriptors are fairly self-explanatory. Say you want to change the font to Helvetica and the duration of the text "slides" from 2 seconds apart to 4 seconds apart. Change {font:Geneva} to {font:Helvetica} and change the 2 in [00:00:02.000] to a 4, change the 4 in [00:00:04.000] to an 8, and so on. Save the file out as plain text and import into QuickTime again, where you will see the changes.

List of QuickTime text descriptors.

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