Fred Endsley

Most home computers are not yet powerful enough to grab/digitize video at sizes larger than 320 x 240, or frame rates greater than 15 frames per second. Ideally you will use a machine with a lot of RAM and a fast hard drive with lots of contiguous free space. If necessary, optimize your drive before attempting any lengthy video grabbing.

Video Grabbing can be done with Premier, or more simply with Apple Video Player. Make sure to allocate plenty of memory to either application, and remember you are digitizing sound as well as visuals.

When you have grabbed the desired video, you can use Premier, or again more simply, Movie Player to do basic editing.

Movie Player can do many things including:

• Playing all current types of Quicktime-compatible files (movies, sound-only movies, QTVR, MPEG, MIDI, etc.).
• Deleting sound or video track if desired (deleting unwanted sound can save considerable space).
• Cutting/copying/pasting frames within a movie or from one movie to another.
• Set looping.
• Report dimensions of Quicktime movies by selecting Get Info: Choose Size from the Movie Menu.
• Exporting movies as MPEG movies (Very good quality with very effective compression. Note, however, that movies to be exported as MPEGs can't have been previously compressed.)
• Exporting movies as AIFF or System 7 sound files.
• Exporting individual frames as Pict files.
• Importing/Converting sound or midi files as Quicktime movies.
• Editing and exporting sound or midi files as AIFF, midi, etc.
• Selecting 'instrumentation' for midi playback.
• Adjusting size, transparency, quality, etc.
• Saving as "Flattened", stand-alone movies that can be playable on non-Apple machines (very important for cross-platform development).

Note: Remember to set the Quicktime window playback head to the beginning before saving, if you want the movie to start from that point.

Sound Edit 16 can:

• Open As (Quicktime) Movie.
• Downsample, edit, mix, add new sound, etc. ( to maintain timed-sync, delete sound by inserting 'silence').
• Save back to original Quicktime file.

Movie Cleaner (Lite) or Media Cleaner (PRO) can:

• Crop.
• Set High Quality/Delayed first and last frames.
• Fade In/Out Video and/or audio.
• Perform very effective compression using various specialized quality settings and compression codecs.
• Media Cleaner Pro offers many more options, like adjusting gamma so that movies look brighter on PCs.

Movie Cleaner (Lite) or Media Cleaner can:

• Reset frame rates to very low rates if desired or necessary.
• Resize the images by percentage.
• Change the palette.
• Perform most types of compression, or even re-compression, at all levels of quality.

Internet Movie Tool can:

• Move data usually located in the resource fork of Macintosh Quicktime files to another location in the file so that the Quicktime movue can be read on non-Macintosh machines.
• Convert a Quicktime movie to a "Fast Start" Quicktime movie so that data usually contained at the end of a file is moved to the beginning of the file. This allows the movie to start playing sooner, before the file is entirely downloaded.

To use Internet Movie Tool, simply drag a Quicktime file onto the Internet Movie Tool icon.

Using Embedded Quicktime Movies in Webpages

For Quicktime movies to be displayed in a web page, both the Quicktime browser plugin and Quicktime system extension must be installed. The Quicktime browser plugin is now standard issue with current versions of Netscape and Explorer, and the Quicktime extension is a standard part of the Mac system. However, the Quicktime extension for the PC system still must be downloaded and installed seperately.

All necessary Quicktime and QTVR software for Mac, Windows, and NT can be gotten from Apple's Quicktime Software site.

Basic Possible Attributes of the HTML <EMBED SRC> Tag:

HEIGHT=size in pixels. WIDTH=size in pixels.

Volume= 0 through 256. Audio volume settings for movie sound.

SCALE=TOFIT, ASPECT, or a number (eg. 1.5). If TOFIT, scales movie to dimensions specified by HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. If ASPECT, scales according to HEIGHT and WIDTH, but maintains aspect ratio. If number, scales movie by value of that number.

AUTOPLAY=TRUE or FALSE. If TRUE, autoplay causes movie to begin playing as soon as the Quicktime plugin estimates that it can paly the movie without waiting for additional data. The AUTOPLAY default is FALSE. Use AUTOPLAY=TRUE when you have 'hidden' the Controller or movie.

CONTROLLER=TRUE or FALSE. Sets the visibility of the controller. The CONTROLLER default is TRUE (visible). Note: If you will have a visible Controller, you must add sufficient extra pixels to the specified HEIGHT dimension. On a Macintosh 16 extra pixels are required to see the whole controller. On a Windows machine with 'Large Fonts' turned-on it takes 24 extra pixels to see the whole controller, and without 'Large Fonts' turned-on it takes 18. Thus, 24 ensures all users can see the controller. As long as you are using solid background color for the webpage, any unused space beneath the controller will be filled with the background color.

HIDDEN (no value needed). Use the HIDDEN attribute to make a sound-only Quicktime invisible (make sure to also use AUTOPLAY=TRUE).

LOOP=TRUE, FALSE, or PALINDROME. The LOOP default is FALSE. When specified as PALINDROME, the movie will play alternately forwards and backwards.

HREF=URL. Provides a link to another page when the movie is clicked on. Only appropriate for a movie without a controller.

PLUGINSPAGE="http://quicktime.apple.com". For those who don't have it, this links to the download site for the Quicktime browser plugin necessary to view Quicktime material.

• A full 'Embed Src' tag might look like this:

  <EMBED SRC="MyMovie.mov" HEIGHT=120 WIDTH=160 CONTROLLER=FALSE AUTOPLAY=TRUE LOOP=TRUE VOLUME=185 SCALE=2 ALT="Quicktime movie with myself as a clown, 126K" PLUGINSPAGE="http://quicktime.apple.com">

Most of the time, though, you will just use a few of these attributes.

NOTE: If a movie is visible and does not have an HREF attribute associated with it the movie can be started or paused by double-clicking or clicking on it.

Making and Embedding Quicktime VR Panorama Movies

Creating QTVR Panoramas

• Begin in Photoshop by making a horizontal panoramic image whose height in pixels is divisible by 4 and whose width in pixels is divisible evenly by 16. If the dimensions aren't evenly divisible by these numbers, the conversion will still work, but distortion will be introduced.

  Remember that the panorama will be converted into a continuous 360 degree space, so you might want to consider how the ends will match or meet. Patterned, monochrome, or gradient backgrounds work well. While in Photoshop, you can layer other images, textures, spaces, etc. onto the panoramic space to increase its richness or to possibly cover end-points that won't otherwise match.

• Rotate the canvas or image 90 degrees counter-clockwise so that what should be the image 'top' is now on the left. Again, if you don't perform this rotation before the QTVR conversion, the process will still work, however the image will be sideways and will tend to "roll" in very interesting ways as it attempts to pan.

• "Flatten" any layers in the image before saving it, without compression, as a pict file. Do not include a file suffix. You might also want to consider adjusting the size of the image to account for its future quality and download/display time on a web page. Clearly, you want to keep it as small as you can. A large QTVR movie is very challenging to a browser, especially if its memory partition is set too low (try 15M).

  The height setting of the QTVR display window will autoscale the panorama movie to fit (based on the initial zoom-in percentage). So if it has to autoscale up your movie by very much, the quality will begin to suffer. The default height setting for the QTVR window is 300 pixels. I wouldn't make panoramas whose height is much bigger than that, or browsers will struggle to download and display. Conversely, if the height of your original panorama is smaller, you can set the QTVR window height to a smaller dimension to prevent pixel distortion caused by autoscaling your movie up to the larger window height.

• Open the pict panorama file in the freeware Apple "Make QTVR Panorama" application which can be downloaded from Apple's QTVR Tools site. Don't worry about the "Tile" movie - you'll throw it out later. Just accept the default settings the first time you try it. After that, you can adjust:
  • Compression Settings - Cinepak is probably best for photographic images; higher quality and millions of colors results in better, but larger movies.

  • View Size - This is the display window size I was talking about previously that autoscales your movie based on its height and the "Default Zoom" setting. The "View Size width setting" will control the angle of view around which your movie will pan - smaller widths force the movie to "bend" around more severe angles.

  • Default Horizontal Pan - sets the beginning display point of your panorama within the View window - 180 degrees sets the start display point exactly in the horizontal middle of the panorama.

  • Default Vertical Pan - does the same thing, only vertically.

  • Default Zoom - As explained previously, this setting affects the amount of autoscaling that is forced by the height setting of the View window. It controls how much space is available for zooming in or out. The default, 75, allows the movie to be zoomed in from the starting point by 75% more, or zoomed out by 25%. 75 is a reasonable default starting point.

• Create the QTVR. If you did not make your original pict panorama divisible be 4 and 16, you get a dialogue to cancel or continue. The process has two parts, first making a segmented "Tile" movie, and then, from that, making the final QTVR movie which should have the suffix ".mov" (same as for a regular Quicktime movie, but don't get them confused). You can trash the "Tile" movie.

• Play the QTVR movie with the special QTVRPlayer, with MoviePlayer or any Quicktime 2.5 aware application, or with a browser as an embedded file in a web page. QTVRPlayer seems to be the smoothest-playing external application, as well as allowing options for changing the size, the correction for the fov (field-of-view), and the refresh and pixel doubling rates.

NOTE: In order for QTVR movies to be "flattened" for use on the internet, or multi-platform distribution on CD-ROM, etc., they must be saved using QTVRPlayer with the options "make movie self-contained" and "playable on non-Apple computers" checked.

Embedding QTVR Movies

• QTVR Movies are embedded and displayed in web pages very similarly to standard Quicktime movies. For QTVR to be displayed in a web page, both the Quicktime browser plugin and Quicktime system extension must be installed. The Quicktime browser plugin is now standard issue with current versions of Netscape and Explorer, and the Quicktime extension is a standard part of the Mac system. However, the Quicktime extension for the PC system still must be downloaded and installed seperately.

  All necessary Quicktime and QTVR software for Mac, Windows, and NT can be gotten from Apple's Quicktime Software site.

• HTML for embedding QTVR could look like this:

  <EMBED SRC="MyQTVRMovie.mov" HEIGHT=300 WIDTH=400 CORRECTION=PARTIAL ALT="QTVR of Lake Michigan, 126K" PLUGINSPAGE="http://quicktime.apple.com">

  The HEIGHT and WIDTH dimensions are those used for the window "View Size" settings in creating the QTVR movie, not the original dimensions of the pict panorama.

  The CORRECTION parameter can be specified as PARTIAL, FULL, or NONE as desired to control the angle of display.

  There are no CONTROLLER, AUTOPLAY, etc. attributes for embedded QTVR>

• Panning QTVRs is done by clicking and dragging within the display window.
  Zooming in or out is done with the "control" and "option" keys.
  QTVR does not yet allow for sound incorporation.