Happy Holidays to all!
The Little QuickTime Page will be off until January 9th. (Hope to see some of you
at our 1/11 Macworld talk, S44:
Making Movies with the QuickTime Player.)
Public Preview 2 of QuickTime 5 was released last week. Both a Mac and Windows version are available at the QuickTime 5 Public Preview page. (Read a review of this release in a ZDNet article, "QuickTime 5 PP2: Ready to play".)
Mac users should take a look at the QuickTime 5.0 AppleScript Scripts page, where you'll find a ton of scripts to automate almost all aspects of the QuickTime Player, and then some.
Adobe Premiere 6.0 was released this week. Among other new features, this video editing program now comes with a limited version of the Cleaner 5 compression tool, allowing you to easily create web-ready QuickTime files. You can also add HREF tracks for synchronizing movie playback with web page content. Read a MacWeek article, "Curtain rises on Premiere 6.0" for a good summary, or go directly to Adobe's Premiere 6.0 page.
Check out the Widgets Page at the QuickTime Authoring for Education site, where you'll find small movie controller sprite movies. There are some that can be used for intermovie communication on a web page, and others that can be added to an existing movie (ideal if you want to create your own skin for a movie, but don't want to script your own controller).
Real Systems has introduced RealSystem iQ, which seems to be an intelligent way of building a distributed media network. This is of interest to QuickTime authors, since Real Servers can stream QuickTime movies (as long as they contain only video and audio tracks). If you go to the RealSystem iQ Resources page, you'll find a link to a PDF document, RealSystem iQ QuickTime, which goes into much detail about when and how to stream QuickTime from a RealSystem Server.
There is a new version of MPEG2Decoder, a MacOS tool that converts MPEG 2 files into QuickTime movies. You can read more and find links to the download page at the VersionTracker MPEG2Decoder page.
Sorenson has released version 1.1 of Broadcaster, the tool for doing live QuickTime 4 streaming. (This version has been in beta for awhile).You can find more information at the Sorenson Broadcaster Overview page (where you'll also find a link to the page where you can download the upgrade if you have version 1.0).
The Third Annual Book Bytes Awards have been posted for this year at MyMac.com. (Our "QuickTime Pro 4 for Macintosh & Windows Visual QuickStart Guide" received the award for Best QuickTime Book, and Lisa Brenneis' "Final Cut Pro For Macintosh Visual QuickStart Guide" received the award for Best Video Application Book.)
Apple, Cisco, Sun, Phillips and others have formed the new Internet Streaming Media Alliance. The ISMA is pushing open standards for streaming media on the internet. Check out the ISMA web site for more information.
Sorenson Services USA has an interactive QuickTime movie that's a Video Bandwidth Estimator. It will calculate approximate bandwidth required (given frame rate, height and width) or frame rate achievable (given bandwidth available, and height and width).
An article at the Boston Globe, "Rush is on to build stream world", reports on QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media, and their market strategies.
Check out "Editorial: QuickTime and Apple's Retail Strategy" at Architosh for some interesting ideas about how Apple could up retail sales by exploiting QuickTime.
Brad Smith has two new iQT columns in MacInterpreter. One is titled "iQT: Components of QuickTime Movies" and the other is "iQT: An Interview with David Dicaire of Totally Hip". These both make interesting reading if you're interested in QuickTime's interactive capabilities and in LiveStage Pro.
GeeThree has released Slick Transitions & Effects, an add-on to iMovie 2. The Slick package has over 40 transitions and 16 effects and costs only $29.95. You can purchase it and read more at the Slick Transitions & Effects page.
If you want to know how to specify which MIME types you want the QuickTime
Plug-in to play (i.e. which types of files you want QuickTime to take over when
encountered on a web page), read Apple's Tech
Info Library article #36508, "QuickTime 4: Customizing MIME Type Assignments
for QuickTime Plug-in" .
David Palermo has a brief tutorial
on creating cubic QuickTime VR panos using Bryce 4 (a 3D terrain generator).
A 12/5 press release, "Clickable Video Revolution Launched" covers how a site devoted to spoof ads, Zapavision, has created an interactive QuickTime movie which lets you "punch" characters in the movie. Make sure to check out the movie at Zapavision's Pointavision page.