StreamingMedia.com has a couple of recorded talk shows you may find interesting. One, "Dissecting Cleaner & Cleaning", is Ben Waggoner (master compressionist) and Francesco Schiavon (QuickTime expert) talking about how to get the most out of Cleaner 5 (the premier compression software). The other, "Automated Encoding for the Enterprise", has Ben Waggoner, Angela Lai (VP of Engineering at Generic Media) and others discussing various strategies for dealing with large amounts of video that need to be delivered via the web.
Totally Hip has a press
release announcing LiveStage Professional 3. The software will be out after QuickTime
5 is released. (LiveStage Pro is the tool most commonly used for creating complex
interactive QuickTime movies.)
One QuickTime developer has a Sorenson
shootout! page that shows pretty convincingly how much better Sorenson 3 is
than Sorenson 2. (These are compressors included in QuickTime 5; Sorenson 2 was
part of QuickTime 4, and Sorenson 3 is part of QuickTime 5, now available as Public
Preview 3.)
QuickTime Text Tracks, a Mac tool for creating a text track that's synchronized to your movie, has been updated to version 1.2. Read more and download from the VersionTracker More Info page on QuickTime Text Tracks.
An article at O'Reilly Network, "Rolling Titles Made Easy" shows Mac users how to take advantage of the QuickTime AppleScripts in order to make rolling titles for a movie. (The article also provides a quick review of LiveSlideShow, the easy-to-use tool for creating interactive QuickTime slide shows.)
An article at Streaming Media World, "Wildform Flix: Stream Your Video in Flash" covers a new (currently Windows-only) tool that can be used to create a Flash version of a QuickTime movie. (The advantage to this is that there are more installed Flash players than QuickTime players. Of course, there are limitations to what can be converted, and the quality of the resulting video.)
There's a listing for our unfinished QuickTime 5 book at Amazon.com. Don't believe the page count (we're not finished...even we don't know exactly how many pages it'll be), but the publication date seems right on target.
As has been reported around the net (see MacInTouch Recent News Archive, for example), BMUG Inc.(the organization that supported all our early QuickTime endeavors, including this page) is no more. (It's particularly ironic that BMUG, the group that had the famous "Tie-dyed in Berkeley by Deadheads" t-shirts, should die just as Apple introduces tie-dye iMacs.)
QuickTime 5 Public Preview 3 is now available, and it includes a beta of the new Sorenson 3 codec. Get Public Preview 3 at the QuickTime 5 Public Preview page.
If you're curious about how much better Sorenson 3 is than Sorenson 2 , you may want to read a page that compares the codecs H.263, Sorenson 2, and Sorenson 3 (included in QuickTime 5 Public Preview 3). (We don't know anything about the source, however.)
Apple and others are sponsoring a free seminar on QuickTime VR in various locations around the country. For details and to register, go to the Nuts and Bolts of QuickTime VR page.
A comparison of Real, Windows Media, and QuickTime is in a Network Computing article, "RealNetworks Skins Apple, Microsoft". Note that this was written by somebody who knows little about QuickTime, and seems very familiar with Real. While some of his complaints are legitimate, it's interesting to note that he recommends $2300 worth of Real software to do various tasks (including serving), but complains about having to purchase 3rd party tools for doing QuickTime (which would cost considerably less than $2300).
A new multimedia document authoring tool, TK3 Author, allows easy inclusion of QuickTime clips. Go to the Night Kitchen home page for more information.
Check out a new Kodak "camera" that will shoot QuickTime video, take still images, and even download and play MP3s. Info is at the Kodak mc3 Portable Multimedia Device page. (Click on the Spec Sheet link to find out more about the device's QuickTime specs.)
You can watch Steve Jobs keynote address from Macworld Tokyo, starting Wednesday evening, if you go to the Macworld Tokyo 2001 Keynote page.
A MacWeek.com article, "Lights, camera, encode!" talks about a Sorenson Media Encoding Services, facilities which will be located around the country and which will provide high-quality QuickTime compression services (as well as encoding in other formats).
You can get version 4.1.2 of Virtual Drummer ($10 shareware drum machine software that relies on QuickTime's music architecture, so you don't need any extra hardware) at the Version Tracker Virtual Drummer page.
Generic Media (the company of ex-lead QuickTime engineer, Peter Hoddie) has demonstrated their Generic Media Publishing Service, which takes a master source file and makes it available in whatever format (including QuickTime, of course) the end-user is prepared to view. You can read February 12 Generic Media press release for more details. And, if you're interested in QuickTime history or hearing more about Generic Media, check out an interview with Peter Hoddie in UpsideToday.
Both Entera and streamingserver.org have disappeared off the face of the Web. Entera was the company that made QuickTime streaming servers for a number of platforms and was recently purchased by CacheFlow. streamingserver.org was a site dedicated to information on open servers and had links to many of the server architectures. streamingserver.org was registered to Entera. Thanks to Koji Okazaki for alerting us to this.
There's an AppleInsider
report titled "Apple's QuickTime 5 in Beta 9"
Fourth in the series of articles on iMovie at Streaming Media World this week
is "iMovie
Streaming: Putting QuickTime Online".
Two more reviews of Terran's Cleaner 5 (compression and post-processing tool):
There's also a DV.com review of Premiere 6 (video editing and effects software).
A MacCentral article, "QTV manager: QT offers 'broad, consistent' exposure" quotes an Apple product marketing manager hyping QuickTime.
Version 2 of Helmut Dersch's PTViewer (a VR panorama and object movie viewer that doesn't require QuickTime) is now available. (It was only last week that we mention version 1.9). You'll find documentation at Helmut's PTViewer for QTVR page. To find a link to download the tool, go to Helmut's main Panorama Tools page, and scroll down about a third of the page.
A MacCentral article, "QT, Spielberg, and Howard making Web content" says that Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard have created video shorts that will be available only as QuickTime streams.
FrameBlender is software that you can use to blend together multiple frames from a video sequence to get a single still image that's of higher quality than you'd get if you took a single frame from the video sequence. Version 2.0a5 is available as an extension to QuickTime Player. Get it at the Dragonfly Digital Design Software page.
Adobe has published their Premiere 6 Hardware Compatibility list; of note is that there are no Mac capture cards that will work with Premiere 6 (yet).
A new website, Quicktimers.com, shows some of the interactive things you can do with QuickTime.
There's a new version (1.9) of Helmut Dersch's PTViewer (a panorama viewer). This version includes a extension so that you can view QuickTime VR cubic panoramas without QuickTime installed. You'll find some documentation at Helmut's PTViewer for QTVR page. To find a link to download the tool, go to Helmut's main Panorama Tools page, and scroll down about a third of the page.
Third in a series of articles on iMovie at Streaming Media World this week is "iMovie Streaming: Making QuickTime for the Web"