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What is QuickTime?

A link-enhnaced excerpt from the

Ways to use QuickTime
Dynamic documents
Electronic publishing
Education
TV and film production
Entertainment
Macintosh training
Presentations
Science and engineering
Two ways to approach QuickTime

Memory is a must
The QuickTime extension
A CD-ROM drive

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What is QuickTime?

QuickTime isn't an application program that you double-click and run; it's an extension to the Mac's system software that application programs can tap into in order to enable you to cut, copy, paste, record, and play dynamic data, which in QuickTime's world are called movies. QuickTime teaches the Mac how to move.

In Apple's words, QuickTime provides people with "powerful new tools for communication more closely approximating the richness of the world in which we live." I may not be that effusive about QuickTime, but there's no denying that it is a genuine innovation, and a preview of the way we'll use computers and television in the future. At the very least, it's a fun way to make the Mac's screen come to life.

Ways to use QuickTime

As with any medium, QuickTime's effectiveness depends on how it's used. Before looking at the technicalities behind QuickTime, I'll spotlight some application scenarios.

Dynamic documents

Today's most popular word processors, database programs, and integrated packages enable you to incorporate QuickTime movies in your documents (see Figure 20-8 "Moving Documents").


Figure 20-8: Moving Documents You can add QuickTime movies to documents created in most word processors, including Microsoft Word, shown here. The small movie icon in the movie's lower-left corner is called a badge, and distinguishes the movie from a still graphic. The badge disappears when a movie is playing.


Because QuickTime movies use so much disk space and because most business documents are ultimately printed, however, I'm a bit skeptical of this aspect of QuickTime. Perhaps the era of dynamic documents will dawn along with the arrival of the "Paperless Office" -- next year, or the year after, or maybe the year after that.

Electronic publishing

Imagine an electronic version of your favorite magazine: You not only read its text, you double-click illustrations and watch them come to life. Double-click a photo in a movie review to see a preview, a music-note icon to hear a snippet of a new hit song, a photo in an interview to see the actual interview, or a stock market graph to see the trends animated.

This brave new world is here now: A multimedia, CD-ROM-based magazine called Nautilus delivers hundreds of megabytes of QuickTime movies, audio, and software (freeware, shareware, and commercial demonstrations) in each issue. And of course, the Macworld Power User Clinic CD-ROM that accompanies this book, uses QuickTime movies to enable you to explore Macintosh components and concepts and to meet interesting people in the Mac community.

Many book and magazine publishers are testing the waters of interactivity, creating CD-ROM versions of encyclopedias, magazines, memoirs, and more. One example: the Voyager Company's The Complete Maus, a fascinating CD-ROM version of cartoonist Art Speigelman's Pulitzer prize-winning Maus, a moving story of his family's tribulations during World War II. To research Maus, Speigelman recorded hours of interviews with his aging father, a concentration camp survivor. In the CD-ROM version, you can hear these interviews as well view digitized Speigelman family photographs and watch QuickTime movies.

Education

Educational software such as Knowledge Revolution's Interactive Physics uses animated sequences to illustrate scientific concepts. History software can show clips of historic events and speeches. Some such products were available long before QuickTime's debut: the ABC News Interactive series, discussed elsewhere in this chapter, are the best known. But these packages require bulky laserdisc players to store their video and sound. With QuickTime, the video and sound clips can be stored along with navigational software itself on a hard disk or CD-ROM.

TV and film production

Broadcasting and film professionals can use QuickTime to create animated storyboards that show camera angles and scene progressions and to create mock-ups of animations that they will produce by using high-end broadcasting equipment such as Quantel's Paintbox. And with high-end Macintosh video products such as Radius' Telecast, Data Translations' Media 100, and Fast Multimedia's Fast Video Machine, they can produce broadcast-quality video on the Mac itself.

Some broadcasters are also using QuickTime to create electronic catalogs of their vast film and videotape libraries. And Apple is positioning QuickTime as a platform for the world of interactive television by encouraging developers of interactive TV boxes--the so-called set-top boxes--to adopt QuickTime as their digital video technology.

Entertainment

QuickTime is nothing if not fun. It's easy to digitize snippets of home videos, and it's fun to play director and piece them together into your own productions. (I guarantee that you won't bore friends and neighbors, either: QuickTime movies use so much disk space that most of your productions will be over within minutes if not seconds.)

And, of course, there's the entire universe of entertainment CD-ROMs that rely on QuickTime to play video sequences. One of my favorites is the Voyager Company's Baseball's Greatest Hits, in which you can explore hours of sound and video clips of baseball's greats and read columns by legendary sportswriter Red Smith.

Macintosh training

Products such as MotionWorks' CameraMan and Strata's Instant Replay let you record the action on the Mac's screen and then save it as a movie. A Mac consultant or trainer can exploit this capability to create customized training software for specific tasks or programs. Or, the movie can be part of a program's on-screen help system. Instead of reading how to resize an object in a drawing program, you can play back a movie that shows you. Indeed, Apple Guide, the help system that's built into System 7.5, supports the playback of tutorial QuickTime movies.

Presentations

Programs such as Adobe Persuasion and Microsoft PowerPoint enable you to create on-screen slide shows. By supporting QuickTime, presentations can also incorporate sound and motion. A medical presentation can contain an animated sequence that illustrates a new discovery. An architect's presentation can include an animated walk-through that takes clients on a tour of an unbuilt building. An attorney's presentation can include video clips of the scene of a crime. A trade show information kiosk can incorporate movies promoting products or exhibitors.

Science and engineering

Time-based data doesn't have to be video clips or sounds. The data transmitted by seismic equipment is dynamic; a QuickTime movie can record this data so that seismologists can play it back at various speeds to study a quake and its aftershocks. Similarly, meteorologists can record data from weather instruments or photos from weather satellites for later analysis or animation. Scientific programs such as Mathematica can create animated sequences from data you supply.

Two ways to approach QuickTime

As all of these examples show, you can approach QuickTime from two perspectives -- as a viewer who primarily works with commercially produced education or entertainment software, or as a producer who creates his or her own QuickTime movies. The path you choose (and you may tread both) will influence your shopping list.

Required Equipment

To use QuickTime, you need a color Mac with a hard disk running System 6.0.7 or later. The 8-bit (256-color) video hardware built into most color Macs will do, but for the best image quality, you'll want video circuitry that can display thousands or millions of colors -- 16- or 24-bit video (see Chapter 29). QuickTime also runs on the PowerBook 140 and 170, but color movies are little more than recognizable on their monochrome screens.

Memory is a must

As for RAM, 8MB is a reasonable minimum, but 16MB or more delivers better performance when recording and saving movies. And don't expect any help from virtual memory, that System 7 feature that lets the Mac treat part of a hard disk as RAM. QuickTime movies may play back poorly when virtual memory is on, and you can encounter disconcerting delays when recording.

The QuickTime extension

You also need the QuickTime extension itself. It's included with the system software on all current Macs. You can also download QuickTime 2.1 from Apple's Web site. Most QuickTime-oriented products, from video editors to CD-ROM titles, also include the QuickTime extension.

A CD-ROM drive

Speaking of CD-ROM drives, they aren't required for multimedia or QuickTime work, but you'll probably want one--the vast majority of commercial QuickTime-based multimedia is distributed on CD-ROM.

Most current Mac models include internal CD-ROM drive. The second-generation Power Macs--the 7200, 7500, and 8500--as well as the Performa 5200 and 6200 series include quadruple-speed CD-ROM drives, as do Mac clones from Power Computing and others. (Chapter 25 of the book is packed with CD-ROM drive details and tips.)

Several companies also offer CD-ROM libraries of canned video clips, sound effects, and animations. (Beware: Some clip CD-ROMs are candidates for "America's Hoaky Home Videos." Try a few before buying -- or make sure the company has a money-back guarantee.) With street and mail-order prices falling below $200, CD-ROM drives have become mainstream add-ons. Most current Mac models are available with an internal CD-ROM drive.