CS4624 Sydow

A collection of files from the book QuickTime Macintosh Multimedia by Dan Parks Sydow, published by MIS Press in 1994, has been loaded onto the Assignments disk in the Derring 2069 lab. The collection includes runnable programs and various files related to C programming with QuickTime.

QuickTime is a system software extension, loaded into the Extensions part of the System Folder of the Macintosh. If is also available for Windows and SGI systems.

QuickTime movies can be included in many applications, like Microsoft Word and Excel, Aldus Persuasion, and HyperCard. In some ways it thus corresponds to MIME, which allows multimedia information to be incorporated into email.

One can work with QuickTime movies in many ways: Apple's Movie Player, the MovieMaker program provided with the Sydow book, Adobe Premiere, etc.

QuickTime movies are stored in files, and are made of frames, so they can be played back as a sequence of frames. The two most common types of movies are: motion video, and animation. These usually are created in different ways, sometimes with different tools. Both can compressed and later decompressed, though the codec used may vary.

Movie Toolbox: functions callable from programs to open, play and alter movies. For example:

• Initialize_Toolbox
• OpenMovieFile
• NewMovieFromFile - load a movie into memory
• CloseMovieFile
• NewCWindow - create a color window
• GetMovieBox - determine the size of a movie
• SetMovieBox - attach a movie to a movie box
• SizeWindow - resize window to movie box
• ShowWindow - make window visible
• SetMovieGWorld - attach movie to window
• StartMovie - ready movie for playing
• MoviesTask - draw a frame, usually in a loop with while test of IsMovieDone

• Window Manager
• Component Manager
  • movie controller components - manage and play movies
  • standard image-compression dialog components - get parameters
  • sequence grabber components - capture

• Photo JPEG: photographic images
• Graphics: still images created using an 8-bit palette
• Animation: for computer-generated animation
• Video: digital video, sequences of photographic images
• Cinepak: compressed video sequences (about 1/2 size of video compression)
• Indeo: Intel-developed algorithm for video compression, available for PC and Macintosh, similar to Cinepak
• MPEG: ISO standard for compressed digital video and audio

PROGRAMS in Sydow Book:

• OneShot: start up, play a movie, and quit
• QuickTrivia: play movies from a list based on responses to trivia questions
• MovieViewer: manage movie files, editing, playback at various sizes