Apple has re-designed their QuickTime
site. The content seems to be about the same, but it's been rearranged;
it's now a lot better organized, making it easier to find stuff.
One weirdness: they've got a GIF animation (rather than an embedded QT movie)
on their first page.
Adobe PageMill 2.0 for Macintosh is now shipping. This web authoring
tool now has support for browser plug-ins, including the QuickTime
plug-in. More details are in an Adobe
press release.
Apple has a patch
for Cyberdog that fixes a problem with embedded QuickTime movies.
Terran Interactive has released a new version of Movie Cleaner Pro.
Version 1.3. includes support for AppleScript; there are sample scripts
provided on their web site. It also has speed and performance improvements,
as well as support for the "other" QuickTime tracks--music,
sprites and text. It's free and available from Terran's
web site.
Apple has introduced the new Performa 6400 Video Editing Edition
station at $2,699. This has the Avid
Cinema hardware and software for M-JPEG compression. It also has
a 200 mHz PowerPC 603e, 32 megs of RAM and a 2.4 gig hard disk. You can
read more about the 6400 in an Apple
press release. If you're in the market for a home video editing machine
or a decent-but-not-quite-professional system for creating video for multimedia
projects, take a good look at this system.
A number of things relevant to those doing web distribution:
Today Paceworks Inc is supposed to release a beta
version of Dancer. Dancer is an animation creation tool that
makes extensive use of QuickTime tracks. It is the first commercial product
that generates a QuickTime sprite track, which is ideal for
web distribution since a sprite track uses much less data than a standard
video track.
Iterated Systems now has a free evaluation
copy of their Clear Video compressor. We also mentioned Clear Video
previously (Little QuickTime Page 8/26/96),
when only the decoder was available. If you plan to distribute QuickTime
video clips on the web, it's worth your while to check out Clear Video,
which achieves very low data rates and very small files.
And, if you're interested in distributing your clips as MPEG rather
than QuickTime, get a demo
version of Astarte's M.Pack, which allows you to convert a QuickTime
clip into MPEG, using software only. At under $500, it's a fraction of the
cost of a dedicated hardware MPEG encoder, but it's also many times slower.
There's a MacWeek
review of M.Pack, too.
Plus:
Last week we forgot to draw your attention to a MacWeek
article on Elecede's Artista board, a new low-cost video capture
card. At under $400 it's in the same category as the ATI card we previously
mentioned (Little QuickTime Page 8/12/96).
If you're interested in QuickTime's text track, you may want to
get ahold of Apple's Interactive
Music Toolkit. Though this Toolkit is meant primarily for musicians
to create enhanced audio CDs, it comes with a neat little tool called the
Lyric Synchronizer which makes it relatively to easy to add a text
track to any movie, not just an audio movie. (We found that we had to disable
video tracks before we tried to save the movie, or it crashed.) Note that
when you go to the Interactive Music Toolkit web site, you can download
just the Lyric Synchronizer.However, if you want some documentation get
the complete install.
Claris this week announced a new version of HomePage. HomePage
2.0 will support the embedding of QuickTime movies as well as other
multimedia "plug-in" elements.
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