|
Also in QuickTime Authoring: Feds Discover the PowerPoint-QuickTime Connection Digital Still Cameras for QuickTime Movies, Part Two Digital Still Cameras for QuickTime Movies, Part One |
One of the things that I enjoy so much about QuickTime authoring is that I have a wide variety of tools available to me for creating content. Not only can I choose the environment that fits a particular authoring mood, but I can also choose one that best suits the final product I'm creating.
This week I'm going to touch upon two editing environments and illustrate how differently they handle transitions between still frames. As you know, when you create a slideshow in QuickTime Pro using the Image Sequence command, the slides flip from one another without any transition between them. This is fine for many presentations, but sometimes you'll want a fade, dissolve, or wipe between frames.
The QuickTime media layer has a number of transitions built into it -- the challenge is tapping them without spending hours doing so by hand. This is when having a variety of QuickTime-friendly applications available to you in your toolbox is so important.
Today I'm going to touch on two such applications: Microsoft PowerPoint 2001 and iMovie 2. Each of these applications allows you to easily tap QuickTime's transition capability, but they do so in very different ways.
|
Here are a few tips to help make QuickTime authoring in PowerPoint 2001 (Mac) more enjoyable. • Increase the application memory allocation if you're going to have many big images in your presentation. • Set up a Master Slide with the background color and other elements that you want to automatically appear on each frame of your show. • Prepare your images beforehand in Photoshop and scale to 640 x 480 pixels before importing into PowerPoint. • Use the toolbars in PowerPoint while authoring. They'll save you lots of time and mouse clicks. • Don't add transitions while assembling your show -- add them while exporting the movie. • Open your PowerPoint movie from within QT Player and save as a QT movie to achieve QT native functionality. • Don't flatten your movie or you'll lose the transitions between frames. |
Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you -- I said PowerPoint 2001 is very QuickTime friendly. As I've stated before in other articles, Microsoft's Mac team in Silicon Valley really knows their stuff when it comes to programming for the Mac platform. QuickTime authoring in PowerPoint is yet another pleasant surprise found in Office 2001.
As a result, many people have a very handy QuickTime authoring tool sitting right there on their hard drive and don't even know it. What I like about authoring in PowerPoint is that I have all of the traditional PowerPoint tools available to me for use in a QuickTime presentation.
A few of the tools that I particularly like are the custom backgrounds, text editing, image control, dynamic storyboard, graphic elements, and yes, QuickTime transitions. In fact you can even import QT movies into PowerPoint and create new presentations with them that can be exported back to native QuickTime.
Once you've built your PowerPoint presentation, you simply select the "Make Movie" command, and the application exports a movie that you can open in QuickTime Player. Don't be fooled by the PowerPoint file icon; this is a .mov file. If you open it in QT player and save it as a self-contained movie, then the icon becomes the familiar QT variety.
|
Once you have your images loaded into PowerPoint, resist the urge to create the transitions one by one. That's a waste of time.
Rather, let PowerPoint create your transitions when you export the movie using the "Make Movie" command. In the export dialogue box you'll see a radio button marked as "Adjust settings ..." Choose it and hit "Next." You will then be presented with another dialogue box that allows you to set a number of parameters including adjusting the dimensions of your movie, creating transitions, adding a soundtrack, and even writing the credits.
|
After you export your presentation and open it in QT Player, pop the hood and take a look at its structure in the "Get Info" or "Get Movie Properties" dialogue box (depending on whether you have version 4 or 5 of QuickTime Pro).
You'll see that PowerPoint has created three video tracks to achieve the effect of a cross-fade transition between each of the frames. It's really quite ingenious what they've done. By using layers manipulation and a few tricks in graphics mode, they created the illusion of sophisticated transitions between frames without generating any new media.
See for yourself by dissecting this sample created with PowerPoint.
|
The downside to this approach is that it isn't as portable as other methods of creating transitions. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say that you want to further compress this presentation to serve on your web site.
If you compress the movie using the Export command in QT Pro, or by using Media Cleaner, your presentation will get flattened into one video track. As a result, guess what happens? That's right, your transitions go away.
Even if you extract all three video tracks that make up your PowerPoint slideshow, compress them individually, and then reassemble them using the exact same layer positioning, it still may not work. Plus you've spent quite a bit of time doing so.
So what's our take-away here? Creating QuickTime presentations with PowerPoint are great when you're going to be displaying them on your computer, via CD (or other media), or on web sites where users have quite a bit of bandwidth.
But if you're looking for a highly compressed presentation that can be downloaded via modem, I think the "flattened" approach to transitions is better. Let's take a look at how iMovie can help you with these.
|
Related Reading
|
If you haven't cozied up with a copy of iMovie 1 or 2, go get it right now. It is one of the most valuable multimedia tools I've ever used, and you can get version 1 for free and version 2 for only $49 US.
To assemble a slide show in iMovie initially takes longer than with other tools such as PowerPoint, but in the end you have a very versatile movie that can be served any way you want.
This flexibility becomes very apparent in the transition arena. iMovie actually builds its transitions from scratch, taking information from the two pieces of media that are transitioning, and then creates a third video clip that is positioned on the same layer as the original segments.
The advantage to this method is that when you're compressing your movie for streaming on the Web, your transitions are not layer-dependent, so they remain intact when flattened.
Take a look at this sample video clip created in iMovie. When you view the movie properties, you'll see that there's only one video track, not three tracks as in the slideshows created with PowerPoint.
As a result, I can use any video compression method that I want to shrink the file size to the point that I can serve it on the Web to modem-connected viewers.
|
QuickTime Transition Samples • Presentations created with QT Pro's Image Sequence command don't have transitions as shown in this example. • You can create elegant transitions, such as these cross-fades, as illustrated in this sample authored in PowerPoint 2001 for the Mac. • iMovie builds transitions from scratch as shown in this example. • If you want to see the entire movie of a tradeshow floor being constructed then destructed, try this slideshow authored in PowerPoint 2001. File size is 4 MB and the movie time is 1:30. |
The downside to using iMovie compared to PowerPoint is that I don't have as much graphical flexibility when preparing the individual frames, and that I have to build each transition by hand instead of having them "gang-generated."
In the end, choosing which application to use to create your presentation depends on where your movie is going to be presented. The QuickTime tools in PowerPoint are very impressive and accessible to just about anyone who wants to make a QT movie to distribute on media.
On the other hand, I think iMovie is a terrific tool for creating movies to be distributed via the Web or on video tape. Either way, I want both applications, plus others I'll be discussing in future columns, in my multimedia toolbox.
See you next time!
Derrick Story is the digital media evangelist for O'Reilly. His current book is The Digital Photography Companion. You can follow him on Twitter or visit www.thedigitalstory.com.
Read more QuickTime Authoring columns.
Return to the Mac DevCenter.
Copyright © 2007 O'Reilly Media, Inc.
