Autodesk 64006-051108-9001 User Guide - Page 110

102 Chapter 7: Formats QuickTime QuickTime is Apple's multimedia and streaming media architecture. It is widely used for both authoring and delivery. For example, many video editing systems use QuickTime as the base format, and the majority of title developers deliver CD-ROM content with QuickTime. QuickTime is also popular for streaming video. See"QuickTime Streaming" on page 108. QuickTime offers a wide range of media types, including synchronized graphics, sound, video, text, music, VR, and 3-D media. It also offers a wide range of special features including interactivity, VR panoramas and objects, alternate versions with user-defined criteria, liverendered video effects, URL links and much more. QuickTime has a wide range of video and audio codecs appropriate for everything from streaming to DVD. The QuickTime architecture also addresses media handling of file formats other than QuickTime movies, such as DV, AVI files, Macromedia Flash, and so forth. The basic version of QuickTime is free, and you can also get a free license to distribute it with any multimedia titles you create. See the Software Licensing section of the Apple Website at http://developer.apple.com/softwarelicensing/agreements/quicktime.html for details. Apple also offers a paid version called QuickTime Pro, which offers additional QuickTime Player and QuickTime Plug-in features not included in the free version, such as the ability to save movies from Web pages, and includes a number of useful tools for analyzing already-encoded movies. Preparing QuickTime One of the easiest ways to create a QuickTime movie is to apply one of the Cleaner preconfigured QuickTime settings to the project files in the Batch window. You can also make your own QuickTime setting by selecting Format > QuickTime in the Output tab of the Settings window. Of all the supported formats in Cleaner, QuickTime gives you the most options and features. When creating QuickTime, you have a range of codecs from which to choose. See "QuickTime Codecs" on page 106. QuickTime movies should be flattened prior to delivery. Flattening enables playback on Windows computers. Cleaner gives you several flattening features, including the ability to flatten batches of movies without re-encoding them. See "Flattening Movies" on page 105. QuickTime 3 (and later) supports Alternate Movies, that enable you to produce multiple versions of a file. Files are played according to criteria you set, such as the connection speed. See "Alternates and Streaming" on page 109. QuickTime 4 and later supports server-based realtime streaming. This enables viewers to watch long movies in realtime, as well as randomly access online movies without having to wait for the whole movie to download first. See "QuickTime Streaming" on page 108.