Section 14.3. Advanced QuickTime Pro: Track Tricks | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

14.3. Advanced QuickTime Pro: Track Tricks

As far as QuickTime Player is concerned , a piece of footage is nothing more than parallel tracks of information: audio and video. Most movies have only two tracksone video and one soundtrackbut there's nothing to stop you from piling on multiple audio tracks, overlapping video tracks, and even specialized layers like a text track or an animation track.

The key to understanding the multiple simultaneous tracks in a QuickTime movie is the set of three commands in the Edit menu:

Extract Tracks. This command brings up the dialog box like the one shown at the top in Figure 14-5, which shows you a list of all the tracks in your movie. "Extract" actually means copy; double-click the name of the track you want to copy into a new Player window. (If you double-click a soundtrack, it appears as nothing but a scroll bar with no picture.) At this point, you can copy some or all of the extracted track, in readiness to paste it into another movie.
Delete Tracks. As the name implies, this command brings up a dialog box in which you can double-click the name of a track that you want to remove from the movie. For example, after experimenting to see which of several soundtracks you prefer (as described next ), you'll want to delete the rejected versions before you save the final movie.
Enable Tracks. This fascinating command highlights an intriguing feature of QuickTime Player Proits ability to embed more than one audio or video track into a single movie. If you really wanted to, you could create a movie with six different soundtracks, all playing simultaneously .

The trick to inserting a new audio track is to press Option as you open the Edit menu. When you do so, the Paste command magically turns into the Add command. Choosing it inserts the new audio track into the selected portion of the movie. When you choose Edit Enable Tracks, youll see a list of all of the movie's tracks.

Tip: Suppose you've created two different versions of a movieone with throbbing, insistent background music, and one with New Age noodling. By choosing Edit

Enable Tracks and then clicking the On/Off buttons beside the track names (Figure 14-5), you can quickly and easily try watching your movie first with one soundtrack, and then with the other.

Figure 14-5. Here are the Extract Tracks and Enable Tracks dialog boxes. If you pasted some text into one of your QuickTime movies, you'd also see a Text Track listed in these dialog boxes, although iMovie is much better at handling text. As an iMovie fan, you'll probably find these boxes most useful when it comes to manipulating your audio tracks.

Now that you know the general workflow, here are a few recipes that illustrate how iMovie + QuickTime Player Pro = Fun and Creativity.

14.3.1. Flip a Clip

So you caught some prize-winning footage of a twister ripping through your countywhile lying prone under your pickup truck, with the camcorder upside-down on the ground? How will you ever sell that clip to the local news stations ?

By fixing it first:

Open the clip in QuickTime Player Pro.

See the steps on page 343.
Choose Movie Get Movie Properties ( -J).

The Properties dialog box appearsa tiny little box with a huge assortment of movie-editing powers (shown at top right in Figure 14-6). The first pop-up menu lists all of this movie's tracks, so that you can operate on each one independently.
From the first pop-up menu, chooseVideo Track. From the second, choose Size .

You can do a lot more than just resize the frame for this video track:
Click the Flip Vertical button (the second button in the row of four that are visible in Figure 14-6).

As you watch, your entire video picture flips upside-downor, in this example, right-side up. The other buttons here would flip the entire picture horizontally or rotate it 90 degrees.
Send the edited movie back to iMovie as described on page 344.

Figure 14-6. QuickTime Player can create very fancy picture-in-picture effects. After copying footage from a second movie (upper left), paste it over he first movie (bottom), and then use the Properties dialog box (top right) to shrink it enough to reveal what's underneath.

Now, this is a goofy example, of course, because you could have just used the Mirror effect in iMovie to flip a picture upside-down. But consider this a training exercise.

14.3.2. Picture-in-Picture

Ever wonder how news channels manage to show a video inset a little TV picture floating in the corner of the bigger TV picture, just over the anchorperson's shoulder (Figure 14-6)?

It's a piece of cake in more advanced programs like Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro, and it's even possible in iMovie with the help of some shareware add-ons (page 177). But the following steps show you how to simulate that effect for free:

Open the newscaster clip in QuickTime Player Pro.

See the steps on page 343. (Of course, you can put any video on top of any video. This newscaster thing is just an example.)
Choose File Open Movie in New Player. Open the second clip, the one that will appear in the smaller, picture-in-picture frame.

It appears in its own window.
Copy as much of it as you want.

If you want the whole thing, choose Edit Select All, then Edit Copy.
While pressing Option, choose Edit Add.

Or, if you chose a stretch of footage in step 4, choose Edit Add Scaled instead. (Keep in mind that QuickTime Player will stretch or shorten the pasted material to fit the selected region.)

Either way, the pasted video now appears on top of the newscaster, covering him up. (Your Playhead is at the end of it; press the left arrow a few times to back up so that you can see it.) In the next steps, you'll shrink this overlaid video track so that it's no longer obscuring the main character.
Choose Movie Get Movie Properties ( -J).

The Properties dialog box appears.
From the first pop-up menu, choose Video Track 2. From the second, choose Size (top right in Figure 14-6). Click Adjust.

A red rectangle appears around the pasted video, which you can manipulate in fantastic ways. For example, drag a red corner handle inward to make the overlay smaller. Option-drag to make the inset snap to one-quarter size. Shift-drag a corner handle to constrain your drag horizontally or vertically. Drag inside the inset to move it around, drag from the red center dot to rotate it, or drag one of the red edge circles to slant the picture, distorting it.

Unfortunately, there's no key you can press to make the inset maintain its original proportions as you drag. You'll have to drag a corner freehand, watching the Size palette's pixel readout until the inset is a perfect fraction of its original size.
When the inset looks the way you like it, click Done in the Properties palette. Export your clip back to iMovie as described on page 344.

14.3.3. The Video Wall

QuickTime Player isn't fussy. It's perfectly happy to accept two, three, four, or more videos , all pasted into the same clip. You can move, scale, and shrink them independently, creating a video-wall effect like the one shown in Figure 14-7.

To create this effect, just repeat the preceding steps, over and over again. The trick, of course, is keeping track of which videos are on top, so that you can control the overlapping.

Actually, it's not terribly difficult if you have good concentration and an assistant with a notebook; see Figure 14-7.

Figure 14-7. Each time you paste another layer of video, it becomes a new track, listed independently in the Properties palette. (You might want to rename each track to help you keep them straight. You can do that by choosing General from the upper-right pop-up menu, and then clicking Rename.)
To specify the front-to-back layering order of your video tiles, choose a layer's name, and then choose Layers from the upper-right pop-up menu. Use the Layer control arrows, shown here, to move this video track closer to the top than the one you want it to cover up. Just remember that higher-numbered tracks cover up lower-numbered ones.