Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 64) He adds, “Regarding QuickTime track swapping for MP4 or MOV movies, if I have a good (perhaps screener) version with OK video but a non-English audio track and also a cam version with an OK English audio track, I can use the Add/Delete track facility of QuickTime Pro to combine the desired tracks of each into a good video/English audio movie without recompressing.” Lowney hopes QuickTime’s days of interactivity are not over. “There’s a lot more there than meets the eye (DRM coding for example), but the most obvious advantage is the use of sprites over static screen shots as opposed to 15 to 30 fps linear video. It’s much more efficient. The longer a screen shot remains visible, the greater the advantage over linear video. I would like to see Apple renew its commitment to interactive media and perhaps they will, starting with Core Animation in Leopard. We shall see. Their current focus on MPEG-4 may foreshadow a switch to BIFS (MPEG-11, or Binary Format for Scenes) for interactivity at some point in the future.” little disappointed that so much video on the web is Flash-based and thus unavailable for our market. I had heard that Silverlight will allow you to transcode to multiple formats effortlessly, which would be a big bonus for us.” James Rieker, educational media developer for the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Critical Care Medicine, says, “We still author our web-based educational materials in QuickTime directly. Although we tend to deliver in several formats, including Flash, QuickTime is still the hub for origination.” All of the doctors in his medical fellowship program, for example, have video iPods. Rieker records PowerPoint lectures on Macs, outputs to MOVs, and then converts them to video podcasts. “The movies are also available on our educational server as larger (640 x 480), high-fidelity renditions of the slides,” Rieker says. “We take some of these and put them on the web for a larger audience as Flash video. Fellows have the flexibility of transcoding the QuickTime whatever happened to QuickTime? Far Left. Immersionography Associates uses QuickTime to generate VR tours like this one. Near Left. Like Flash, QuickTime offers developers the ability to customize player skins. “We’re a Mac shop so most of the video we do is QuickTime, although final deployment is almost always FLV,” says Dana Kirk, a lead developer at Hitch Creative. “Occasionally, we convert to Windows Media. It’s interesting seeing the major shift towards Flash video on the web. I’m wondering what Silverlight is going to do to the market. “As a tool, for whatever reason, I’ve never thought of QuickTime as anything much more than a media player,” Kirk continues. “Years ago, I used to use an Avid, then Media 100, and I always felt that QuickTime was too limiting for our purposes. If we edit anything now, it’s with iMovie or Final Cut Pro and then converted/compressed with Sorenson Squeeze to whatever format we need. If we get video from anyone else, however, we usually ask for QuickTime if possible.” He adds, “We’re developing a service geared towards the mobile market (Windows Mobile initially) and are a 64 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007 movies into whatever format they want (you can’t do that easily with Flash) and don’t have to have a wrapper like Flash does. I like Flash, but it is one of our delivery vehicles, not our authoring tool.” As an example, he points to a page he recently put together collecting clips from a recent medical conference (www.ssih.org/meetings/2007_pres.html). “I did this page using QuickTime as a palette to lay out the talking head with the slides and video, and then converted it to Flash for delivery.” Rieker adds that most of the interactivity he offers comes from QuickTime chapters, as shown at http://metconference.com/Pittsburgh2005/global/presentations/F P1_disc.htm. “Not as flashy as Flash,” he concedes, “but quite serviceable.” Thomas Fruin, a developer working in Chile, still relies heavily on LiveStage Pro for his projects, which http://www.ssih.org/meetings/2007_pres.html http://metconference.com/Pittsburgh2005/global/presentations/FP1_disc.htm http://metconference.com/Pittsburgh2005/global/presentations/FP1_disc.htm http://metconference.com/Pittsburgh2005/global/presentations/FP1_disc.htm
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