Section 14.3. Advanced QuickTime Pro: Track Tricks


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 Movie Properties dialog box (Figure 14-5). It opens when you choose Window Show Movie Properties ( -J).

Here's some of the fun you can have at this point:

  • Turn off tracks . Turn off the Enabled checkbox for any track you want to hide/mute. 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 .

    Or maybe you've created two different versions of a movieone with throbbing, insistent background music, and one with New Age noodling. Using this option, you can quickly and easily try watching your movie first with one soundtrack, and then with the other.

  • Extract Tracks . Click a track name and click the Extract button (top left). "Extract" actually means copy and separate 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 button removes the selected track 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.

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

Figure 14-5. The Properties dialog box shows you all the parallel streams that go by when you play a movie: the various video, sound, and even text tracks.
The Visual Settings tab is particularly useful for iMovie fans, because it lets you do things you can't do in iMovie (like rotating a movie 90 degrees).

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 turned 90 degrees on the ground? How will you ever sell that clip to the local news stations ?

By fixing it first:

  1. Open the clip in QuickTime Player Pro .

    See the steps in Section 14.2.3.2348.

  2. Choose Window Show Movie Properties ( -J) .

    The Properties dialog box appears (Figure 14-5).

  3. Click Video Track, and then click Visual Settings .

    You can now apply all kinds of freaky changes to this video track:

  4. Click one of the Rotate buttons (the third and fourth arrow buttons visible in Figure 14-5) .

    As you watch, your entire video picture flips 90 degrees in the corresponding directionin this example, right-side up. The other buttons here would flip the entire picture horizontally or vertically.

  5. Send the edited movie back to iMovie as described in Section 14.3 .

    OK, the twister example is farfetched. But what about videos taken with a digital still camera, in which the photographer reflexively turned the thing 90 degrees, as he might when taking a photo?

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)?

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

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. But the following steps show you how to simulate that effect for free:

  1. Open the newscaster clip in QuickTime Player Pro .

    See the steps in Section 14.2.3.2. (Of course, you can put any video on top of any video. This newscaster thing is just an example.)

  2. Choose File Open File. Open the second clip, the one that will appear in the smaller, picture-in-picture frame .

    It appears in its own window.

  3. Copy as much of it as you want .

    If you want the whole thing, choose Edit Select All, then Edit Copy.

  4. Choose Edit Add to Movie .

    Or, if you chose a stretch of footage in step 4, choose Edit Add to Selection & Scale 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.

  5. Choose Window Show Movie Properties ( -J) .

    The Properties dialog box appears.

  6. Click Video Track 2, then click Visual Settings. From the Scaled Size pop-up menu, choose Percent. Then type 50 into the first box .

    You've just made the pasted footage appear at one-quarter its original size (reduced 50 percent in each dimension). (Because "Preserve Aspect Ratio" is turned on, you didn't have to type 50 into the second box.)

    The inset is now hugging the top-left corner of the newscaster window. If you like, you can type numbers into the Offset boxes to shove it away from that corner, keep in mind that there are about 72 pixels per inch.

  7. When the inset looks the way you like it, close the Properties palette. Export your clip back to iMovie as described in Section 14.3 .

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 double-clicking a track's name.)
To specify the front to-back layering of your video tiles, choose a layer's name, and then click Visual Settings. Use the Layer control, circled here, to move this video track closer to the front of the stack. (Lower-numbered tracks cover up higher-numbered ones.)




iMovie 6 & iDVD
iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
ISBN: B003R4ZK42
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 203
Authors: David Pogue

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