Figure 5. The secret add and trim selections.
By Derrick Story
Once I've viewed a video clip, I find it nearly impossible to resist editing it somehow. If you know how to cut and paste, editing multimedia in QuickTime is a snap.
I usually start by opening one or two player windows containing my "source" media—the existing content from my video library. I then open a third window that doesn't contain any media at all using the New Player selection under "File." Now, creating a new video is simply a matter of selecting segments from my source movies, copying them, and pasting the clips into the new player. Drag and drop.
Most of the tools you need are found under "Edit." But there are many shortcuts to make the job even easier, and here are a few that I use often.
The Edit menu gives you the basic stuff that you're used to seeing in other applications: cut, copy, paste, and clear. But, if you hold down the Option key (Mac) or the Control/Alt keys (Windows) while clicking on Edit, you get two additional useful editing controls: Add and Trim (replacing the Paste and Clear options).
Figure 5. The secret add and trim selections.
The Add command allows you to cleanly insert a selected clip into an existing video. This includes all associated tracks—audio and video. Make sure you clean up your clips before adding them to another piece.
Trim removes everything on both sides of a selected clip leaving the selection as a standalone movie—this is a real time-saver! Otherwise, you would have to select all the parts you didn't want and delete them.
One final note, a very handy tool to help you manage your new creation is the multifunction Get Info box located under "Movie." Here you can set the preview frame, add copyright info, enable auto play and much more.
The seldom-discussed PictureViewer is actually a very handy application—especially for portable computers where its compact size and light RAM requirements make it attractive over bulky image-editing programs. You should note, however, that this "bonus app." is only included with the Pro version of QuickTime. In other words, it's another reason to pony up the 30 bucks.
PictureViewer allows you to open and view all of these still image formats: BMP, FlashPix, GIF, JPEG/JFIF, MacPaint, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, QuickTime Image File, SGI, Targa, and TIFF. You can enlarge, rotate, flip, and print these pictures. But what's really cool is that you can export these images to the other formats.
So let's say you're on the road and you need to upload a screenshot to your web site to accompany a new article you're going to post. After you save the screenshot (on the Mac side, for instance, the only option is a bulky PICT file), you open it in PictureViewer.
Now the fun begins. You can reduce or enlarge the size as needed, then export it as a JPEG graphic. Choose the compression and bit size, export it, and you instantly have a web-compatible graphic that's only a fraction of the size of the original.
And the beauty is that PictureViewer typically only uses about 2 Mbytes of RAM and launches in just a few seconds. Most other image applications need about ten times that amount of of RAM and take forever to load.
After just an hour or so of playing, you can see how easy it is to move from simply viewing multimedia to editing and authoring. Adding bits of sound and video to your web site are suddenly well within reach. There are no special server requirements, and the QuickTime plug-in has proved to be a very popular download.
After you have created clips to post, you'll want to compress them for fast downloading by your site visitors. Guess what? That functionality is also built-in to QuickTime. In upcoming articles we'll explore more of the hidden tools, filters, and codecs just waiting to be discovered. In the meantime, go get yourself some video and play.
The Many Facets of QuickTime (Part 1)
Tools for Viewing Multimedia (Part 2)
©1999 Web Review. Reprinted with permission.