A few amazing bits about Quicktime 7

Hey!
In the past few days I've been noticing a few new things in Quicktime (the player, not just the arquitecture) that could make it in an indirect way one of the coolest things in the new Production Suite and IMHO one of the best Quicktime upgrades ever.

The most obvious things are H.264 and multi-channel audio. I have no words to say how amazing H.264 is, not just for HD distribution but also for SD. It has much better quality than MPEG-2 DVD streams at half the data rate! Web video will be stunning a year from now (when enough QT 7 players are installed out there to justify H.264 encoding!) Forget about expensive blu-ray discs, if at some point DVD Players with H.264 become the standard, you'll be able to fit 4 or 5 hours of great looking video on a 4.7 GB disc!


But, outside of the spectacular things, there are some cool things that are so useful for FCP/Motion/DVD SP users:


* QT Pro can now export several items simultaneously, without having to wait for one task to be finished to begin the next one. It can also launch and play a movie while encoding is taking place for another one.

* There's a new preference item that opens movies with the high quality flag turned on. This is amazing, since DV25/DV50 (DV100 too?) Quicktime files are usually created with that turned off.

* Animation and other tough to process uncompressed codecs now play at full quality when in full screen mode. They used to appear pixellated before QT 7 here.

* If you want to upsample CD audio to 48K for video use, now QT Player has a menu with several re-sampling quality modes. The highest one has amazing quality and is still very fast!

* The movie properties are now a spreadsheet-like window, which allows you to quickly change several properties.

* It has a jog/shuttle control in the A/V controls window. Works very well!

* Apple's DV50 codec is now a standard codec, which I believe wasn't the case before. This is cool for motion graphics work in stations that don't have FCP installed. Apple uncompressed codecs are not available for encoding without FCP, but QT does open them and reports them as "4:2:2 YUV".

* There's an incredible annoyance, though. Data rates are now reported as kilobits per second, which could be useful for low data rate MPEG variants, but forces you to use a calculator for production codecs. Please Apple add a preference for this!

I just wanted to share this



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

Thanks Adolfo for the great list



Michael Horton
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Some addition to the "bright sight of QT7 Player":
? (QT)Text files now open as a movie file - no import necessary

and some for the "dark side of QT7 Player":
? Timecode and source/reels are not available any more
? Brightness/Contrast and other video settings are only available with high endgraphic cards (better than my ATI Radeon 9600)
? Changing size and position of tracks interactive by dragging or using the arrow keys has disappeared
? QTtext support is again way worse - no style drag, no text drag, no foreground/background color etc.
? Scripting support is a liitle bit more complicated and several features are gone

But you can keep the old QTPlayer (best version 6.5.1) to have best of both worlds.

Andreas