QT7

[Archive]

Posted By: Dean Laffan

My first impressions:

1) H264
WOW ! This rocks. I checked out all the clips at the gallery
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/ and that is some cool stuff.
How ironic that when I first started encoding in QT1 the video was so
small it was almost literally postage stamp sized ( I think our first
movie was 160 x 120) Now in QT7 the damn movie trailers don't even fit
on my 17" LCD ;-) Incidentally you will need 10.3.9 to run QT7

2) UI
Some nice improvements. A completely redesigned Movie Properties
window that features tabbed access to the various elements. This is a
nice fix up for the appalling V6 version (mac) where they removed from
V5 the ability to arrow down through the properties so to move through
them you had to click, pop up, select and drop repetitively. That was
SO bad you hope someone got fired for that one :-(

One unfortunate fact in V7 this new Properties pane does not include
any display of current time so you need the Movie Info window open as
well if you want frame accurate info which is a real pain. If anyone
from Apple is here can we please have that back in a point release ?
What would be even better is if QT can see the movie is 24fps it
displays the frames to match. If it is 25 fps ditto etc.

This new Properties Pane is also context sensitive so the information
in the bottom half changes depending on the track selected (say audio
or video)

A really neat feature I nearly didn't even notice is you can right
mouse click the top of the pane where tracks are listed and choose what
properties you want to display such as Duration, Data Rate, Data Size,
Channels, Sample Rate and more ... but sadly as mentioned not Current
Time

You now also manipulate tracks, delete/enable/extract via this panel
rather than the Edit in the menu

Also fixing one of my long time gripes is the Save/ Save As function
now defaults to Self Contained rather than
reference.

There is now an AV Control pane Command+K that gives you Volume, Bass
Treble, Balance controls along with a Jog Shuttle slider and a Movie
Speed slider.

There is also a Content Guide Window that pops a free floating window
of current hot picks etc. The funny thing is when you click one of
those items, say the War of the Worlds movie trailer, that fires up
iTunes and the movie plays in iTunes ! So now you have on screen The
QT Player window, The QT Content Guide and now iTunes ;-) I'm not sure
about this one .....

3) Recording
You can now record audio via your inbuilt mic and video with audio (via
your web cam if attached) The QT Preferences pane allows you to choose
H264 or MPEG-4 as record codec.

4) Share Movie
A new item in the file menu that allows you to publish your movie to
your .mac account or recompress to email. I haven't really had any
time to use this much other than to save down the H264 NASA movie which
was 47Mb which got crunched down to 1.1MB It gives you a little pane
prior to compression outlining the pixel size and estimated file size
(it guessed 900k for that movie) It took about 10 min to do that
export on my dual 1Ghz G4 from the H264 content but only seconds for
another smaller movie on my little 500Mhz Powerbook When the movie
has finished compressing a new mail message pops up with the movie
already attached just waiting for you to address it. Not bad. I don'
have a .mac account so can't speak to that 'Publish to Web' feature.

5) MPEG-2
At first i was excited to see that it played VOB files 'out of the box'
then I noted from the Apple tech specs
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/player/specs.html that support for VOB
in QT7 is inherited from your V6 MPEG-2 Playback Component if you had
purchased that previously or had it installed via DVDSP, which I had.

Obviously all of the above refers to the Pro version. Since this is a
new version you need to rebuy a Pro licence AU$44. In the standard
version the Pro features are greyed out with a little "PRO" badge
beside them as an incentive to upgrade.

All in all ... a nice release with the H264 being the jaw dropper, go
get it.



Regards


Dean Laffan
Real World Productions
93 Lucerne Crescent
Alphington, 3078
Victoria, Australia
Studio 61-3-9443-1644
Mobile 0418-525-315

http://www.realworld.com.au