QuickTimeResources
From B.Comm media wiki
Contents |
QuickTime Resources
H.264
- what is H.264
- Apple's official page briefly outlining what H.264 is.
- Apple H.264 faq
- Apple's Frequently Asked Questions page about H.264. Better than the introductory page, more details and a better technical outline of what it is.
- How to Compress to H.264
- This is a wiki page outlining the basics of compressing to H.264 (MPEG4).
Converting to QuickTime
- Perian
- This is free software for Macintosh that lets QuickTime do heaps more with different sorts of files. I'm pretty sure this is what lets me open and transcode avi files from my still camera into QuickTime. Perian needs QuickTime installed, it provides more functionality for QuickTime.
- How to convert avi to QuickTime
- This links to a tutorial which details software that needs to be installed, and how to convert most avi files to QuickTime. At this point most of this software is not installed in our labs and it is unclear at this point if individual users can install this software (but it would be worth a try).
- ReelBean
- This is a free OS X application that does lots of file conversions of time based media. Be worthwhile seeing if you can download it and run it from your individual accounts...
--Adrian Miles 17:15, 10 March 2006 (EST)
QuickTime Player
- Apple's list of tutorials for using QuickTime Pro.
- These are very clearly written and very accessible. They all require QuickTime Pro.
- Text Tracks
- How to add and use text tracks in QuickTime, using QuickTime Player Pro.
- Chapter Tracks
- How to add and use chapter tracks in QuickTime. Chapter tracks are chapters in your video, it allows a drop down menu to appear in the player so that users can jump to any chapter in the finished work.
- HREF tracks
- HREF tracks are hypertext references in QuickTime movies. They are a special sort of text track and so when the movie is clicked at a certain point in time the nominated URL is loaded. If you use automatic HREF's then the URL is loaded automatically as the movie plays. Last time I tried doing this, using this tutorial, it did not work. :-(
- H.264 compression for dummies
- Not really, but this is using H.264 using pretty much the defaults that ship with QuickTime Pro.
- Video for iPod
- As above, the dummies guide to compressing so that your work will play properly on the current iPods.
- TimeLine movie
- This is a link to the directory where you can download the QuickTime timeline movie (timeline.mov). You can use this movie to make movies of specific durations to make life easier when editing - for example if you wanted to have a still image last for 20 seconds, then timeline.mov makes this trivial to do.
Using eZedia
- Notes on common problems when using eZedia
- This is a page that outlines many of the more common errors when using eZedia. It also provide a copy (in pdf) of the help for the program, and some screencasts.
How to Compress Video and Audio
- How to Compress to H.264
- This is a wiki page outlining the basics of compressing to H.264 (MPEG4).
Compressing Video (size calculation)
Some numbers on how to figure out compressed file sizes
As compressing a video to H.264 can take a long time, even hours, it is useful to be able to estimate the final compressed file size. Remember that the bitrate of the audio/video is all that effects the final file size, and video window size will only effect the quality. Follow these steps to estimate the compressed size:
Quicktime Compression Settings
Add together the video and audio bitrate figures. In this case 80 + 150 = 230 kbit/sec
We need to change this figure into kilobytes so that it is more meaningful to us. 1000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte whereas 1000 kilobits doesn’t equal 1 megabyte. Divide 230 by 8 which equals 28.75 kilobytes.
This means that for our settings of 150 kbit video and 80 kbit audio it will take up about 29 kilobytes of space per second.
We can then just times this figure by the seconds in our video. In my example in class it was 10 seconds. Therefore the final file size should be about 290 kilobytes.
Now that we know the final size it is good to know how long this would take to download on a broadband connection. Most broadband connections are probably at 512kbit/sec in Australia. From this we can see that our 230kbit/sec bitrate for our video is below the broadband speed of 512kbit. This means that the video should stream very easily on most broadband connections. If it were over 512kbit the user would have to download a certain amount of the video before it would start to stream.
Quicktime and Internet Explorer 7
The old way of embedding qt doesn't work in IE7. There are work-arounds.
I myself (Jenny) am going with Apple's second option. Other people can link to the external .js file that I have uploaded to my server space at http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~e52351/miki/AC_QuickTime.js.
you now need to follow the instructions from Apple from point 2 of 'External JavaScript Solution Two: For Multiple Occurrences of QuickTime Content'.
Here is my example. Now this works well on Firefox, but I haven't tested it on IE7, which is only available for Windows ... and I only have a Mac. So we need to watch this space!
Compressing Video (size calculation)===
Podcasting
How to Make a Podcast
- Apple's how to make a podcast on OS X
- As the name suggests, how to make a podcast using OS X (what we run in our studios). It is absurdly simple to do, and with the latest GarageBand, easier.
VideoBlogging, AudioBlogging, Podcasting
How to Make a Video Blog Post
- Video casting using OS X
- Apple's simple tutorial on using OS X and QuickTime Player to make a video cast. This is really only part way there, the RSS bit is probably more complicated than they let on, but this is a good tutorial for seeing one way of very easily capturing content to a computer.
How to Embed Video in a Blog Post
You can embed video in your blog by first publishing it via a third party video hosting service (eg YouTube or Blip) and then including it into your blog from there. This is a good solution for a lot of video online, as it means the hosting service has to provide all the bandwidth, and it generally makes publishing your videos much easier. We'd generally recommend Blip over YouTube as it offers many more features for video blogging.
However, there are times when you want to host the video on your own service (for example for reasons of copyright and/or ownership). For instance the projects created in eZedia require a media folder of video and audio assets to be present with the video for the interactive projects to play. Such interactive works cannot be published using a service such as Blip because there is no way to upload the video and the media folder and keep them together! In such cases you have to publish your QuickTime content yourself.
Now, your media must be already compressed and ready to go online for all of the following.
To embed video or audio into your blog you need to be able to:
- log in to your web site using something like Cyberduck or Fugu
- upload your video and a poster image to your web site
- know the url of both the poster image and the video
- have installed one or more of the following plugins in WordPress
- Embedding QuickTime in WordPress using vPIP
- This page in the wiki goes through the basics of how to embed QuickTime into your blog post. It includes information about the software used. It assumes you are using the vPIP plugin.
- Embedding QuickTime in WordPress using QuickTime Embed
- This page in the wiki goes through the basics of how to embed QuickTime into your blog post. It assumes you have already installed the QuickTime Embed plugin.
How to Make a Poster Image
Written instructions below, if you would like to view a screencast then click the link next to the image. The video is around 15MB in size and requires a recent version of QuickTime.
(http://media.rmit.edu.au/projects/wiki/screencasts/MakePosterFrame.mov)
A poster image is a frame that you grab from your movie that you embed in your blog. You do this so that the image appears in the blog, but the video is only downloaded if the user clicks the poster image. The advantage of this is that you can have lots of poster images on your blog and instead of the page downloading some stupid amount of video in the background it will only download what is requested. (Think about somewhere like YouTube, all those thumbnails are poster images, if they were the actual videos then every YouTube page would require an enormous amount of expensive bandwidth, and time, to download.)
What follows requires QuickTime Pro and a graphics program such as Photoshop.
Now, to make the poster movie there are several ways. If you have just a straight forward video file the easiest and quickest way is to:
- have Photoshop running
- open the original compressed video in QuickTime player
- select the frame you'd like to use for your poster movie
- Edit - Copy
- go into Photoshop
- File - New (Photoshop knows you've copied an image with certain dimensions so the file size will already be correct)
- Edit - Paste
- File - Save as and select JPG
- name the file something like filenamePoster.jpg, where filename is the name of the original video file so you know what video it is related to
- upload and embed the poster movie you've just created (don't forget to also upload the compressed video) using vPIP
--Adrian Miles 12:06, 21 March 2006 (EST)
Seth Keen has also written a pdf describing how to make a poster movie, this is being edited as the MPEG4 exporting needs to be updated to the H264 codec.
--Adrian Miles 12:06, 21 March 2006 (EST)
WordPress QuickTime Plugin
- WordPress QuickTime plugin
- You can add this to your WordPress installation, it is supposed to stop WordPress from inserting hard line breaks in the embed tag, which always breaks your embed tag in your posts. (Untested.)
- PodPress plugin
- This is a WordPress plugin that automates tags and RSS creation for media enclosures.
Converting Different Formats to QuickTime
By Tools
Digital Still Cameras
Digital still cameras that can shoot video seem to commonly produce .avi files. This is a Microsoft format and you should be able to open it in our labs using QuickTime Pro. I'm not sure if this is because QuickTime pro can read it, or because we've installed Perian, which is a free OS X plugin for QuickTime that lets you read a variety of file formats. Generally speaking, if QuickTime Pro can open an avi then do file save as... with no compression and it will wrap the video as a .mov and QuickTime will be happy.
Mobile Phones
Recent mobile phones have pretty much adopted .3gp or mp4 as their file format for video. This is very good because it is already a MPEG4 format which means QuickTime can read it without anything else needing to be done. However, some webservers (for technical reasons about mime types that you really don't need to know about) can't manage 3gp or mp4 so it is always a good idea to open your .3gp or mp4 file in QuickTime Pro and just do the good old File Save As.... the resulting file will now end in .mov and webservers etc will be happy.
By Formats
mp4
This is identical to 3gp but with .mp4 substituted...
This is the video specification that is based on the MPEG4 standard that is designed for mobile use. It is very highly compressed, so is able to be sent over mobile phones, but still manages a pretty good job in terms of image quality. QuickTime pro can automatically compress video to .3gp (it is a present when you choose File Export) but unless you're making video for mobile phones you wouldn't do this. What you would normally be doing is having shot something on your phone and then wanting to do something with it in QuickTime.
While QuickTime Pro can read .3gp without you doing anything else than opening it in QuickTime Pro it is a good idea to simply go File Save As... so that the file ends up with .mov at the end. This is because sometimes some programs (and webservers) don't understand what .3gp means so it creates errors or problems, whereas they all (programs and web servers) know what to do with files that end in .mov.
mp4
This is the video specification that is based on the MPEG4 standard that is designed for mobile use. It is very highly compressed, so is able to be sent over mobile phones, but still manages a pretty good job in terms of image quality. QuickTime pro can automatically compress video to .mp4 (it is a present when you choose File Export) but unless you're making video for mobile phones you wouldn't do this. What you would normally be doing is having shot something on your phone and then wanting to do something with it in QuickTime.
While QuickTime Pro can read .mp4 without you doing anything else than opening it in QuickTime Pro it is a good idea to simply go File Save As... so that the file ends up with .mov at the end. This is because sometimes some programs (and webservers) don't understand what .mp4 means so it creates errors or problems, whereas they all (programs and web servers) know what to do with files that end in .mov.
.avi
This is a windows format. You can open this in the labs in QuickTime Pro no problems, probably because we've installed Perian which is a free bit of software that adds some nice functions to QuickTime Pro (like reading avi files). Once you've got it opened in QuickTime Pro you should either go File Save As... so that it becomes a .mov file, or if you need to compress it then choose File Export.
.wmv
not sure yet, if you know then email adrian dot miles at rmit dot edu dot au
.flv
.flv is flash video. This can be opened in QuickTime Pro as long as Perian is installed. As with other formats that let us get by through Perian, use File Save As... to save the file in a .mov wrapper for use in other projects. The instructions for .avi files apply here too.
QuickTime Gamma Problems
One for the technical geeks. Gamma refers, more or less, to the brightness of your computer screen. Macs and PCs have different gamma's (Macs are brighter) and so video on a PC that looks fine on a Mac can appear dark if the gamma is wrong. Once upon a time I seem to remember that QuickTime did something clever about this, but apparently there's a but in H.264 (which I assume means it will one day go away) where it defaults to a Mac gamma and you can't do anything about it.
If this bothers you, or you have work that is of importance that you want to ensure is viewed properly, then check out Art Adams' two articles. The first describe the problem and a solution, while the second has other solutions and also points out the easiest way to make H.264 flash video from H.264 QuickTime video.
