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The Currency of Digital Media

Jan 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Barry Braverman

Sidebars
The QuickTime Pyramid
Quicktime Supported File Formats

For shooters, an understanding of QuickTime is essential.

These days it seems like QuickTime is everywhere, from web applications to digital still cameras. For example, this Lumix model camera from Panasonic captures QuickTime motion JPEGs with audio.

For those of us who shoot and otherwise handle digital media on a daily basis, it should hardly come as a revelation that QuickTime is everywhere - certainly in Mac-based applications, but also in many PC apps.

QuickTime is in dozens of web and support applications, from Discreet Cleaner to Adobe GoLive. It's in popular NLE software like Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress DV; in professional audio production tools like DigiDesign ProTools and Bias Peak; in consumer products like iTunes and educational CD-ROMs; and in DVD authoring suites like Sonic Solutions DVD Creator and DVDit!. The list goes on.

If you're working seriously in digital media today on whatever platform, chances are overwhelming that you're working with QuickTime in some shape or form. Incredibly, QuickTime can handle more than 200 different file types, from JPEGs and TIFFs to the latest Dolby AAC and MPEG codecs (including MPEG-4) ¡ª on both Windows and Macs. As shooters and therefore voracious consumers of bits and bytes, we may not recognize it, but QuickTime is the engine that drives many aspects of our industry, especially in higher-end production and post applications. When it comes to the handling, processing, and transferring of files, QuickTime is the currency of digital media.

So for shooters, an understanding of QuickTime is essential if we want to keep control of our images after they leave the camera. The digital streams that define our work and reputation can be handled, mishandled, composited, compressed, transferred, encoded, synchronized, cropped, keyframed, and filtered in thousands of different ways. This is routine stuff for today's digital manipulators, and QuickTime enables exactly this type of manipulation.

For some shooters, the QuickTime odyssey begins in the camera, as more than 200 camera models from 20 manufacturers now record directly to QuickTime in files that run the gamut from AVI to MPEG.

So What Is QuickTime Anyway?

The term QuickTime is difficult to define because the technology means many things to many different people.

If you're involved in web design, you may know QuickTime for its file handling and compression capabilities. If you author DVDs, you may know QuickTime as the mysterious .qt file that appears with Sonic Solutions' MPEG-2 and AC-3 files. And if you're a Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress, or (to a lesser extent) Adobe Premiere user, you know QuickTime for its ability to synchronize audio, video, and text streams.

QuickTime is not an application, but a technology built on an extraordinarily versatile architecture. QT's abilities form the basis for controlling all types of time-based media ¡ª video, audio, text, and even VR images. A shooter wanting insight on digital media today could do no better than to look at QuickTime's enabling architecture. (At right.)

Understanding this architecture allows the shooter to understand the downstream handling and processing of his images. Note how QT's application layer resides atop the ¡°engine.¡± By gaining a grasp of QuickTime, even non-technical shooters can understand relatively complex applications like Adobe After Effects, which uses QuickTime's Movie Toolbox to accomplish tasks such as scaling, cropping, and rotation of images. Movie Toolbox contains many ¡°stock¡± filters, including sepia and film noise, that are accessible to anyone with the Pro version of the QuickTime Player.

As a shooter, one of the ways you are most likely to encounter QuickTime is through Discreet Cleaner. The Swiss Army knife for DV shooters, there is perhaps no better or more extensive implementation of the QuickTime engine than Cleaner, which can be found on multimedia workstations around the world. (Recently Canopus released a competing product, ProCoder, which utilizes the QuickTime architecture to a lesser degree. For more information, see the ProCoder review in the October 2002 Video Systems.)

Cleaner version 6 offers a simple-to-use interface that allows video encoding in more than 20 different formats. The current version includes the ability to encode MPEG-2 in two-pass VBR mode without the previously required (and expensive) Charger and Supercharger products. Cleaner's QuickTime engine powers sophisticated processing capabilities that are of particular interest to shooters. DVD producers are constantly looking for additional content to fill their discs, so older analog material is now finding its way to viewers. If you plan to repurpose your footage across multiple media (and who doesn't?) Cleaner and QuickTime will be part of your life.

Many video pros are familiar with Discreet Cleaner, one of the most popular applications among DV shooters, which is based on a QuickTime engine.

One of the strengths of the QuickTime architecture is that it allows developers to easily update their products without going to the application layer. In Final Cut Pro, for example, 24p support will undoubtedly come as a download component to QuickTime, not a major (and expensive) FCP revision.

A similar approach will probably be taken for shooters looking ahead to DV50 via FireWire on the desktop. Thanks to QuickTime 6 and anticipated advances in FireWire, many DV shooters will soon be shooting ITU-601 4:2:2 as routinely as they are now shooting garden-variety 4:1:1 DV25. Last April, Apple and Panasonic announced a joint effort to bring FireWire to DVCPRO 50 and DVCPRO HD cameras and decks. Hopefully, the $5,000 capture card we all lusted over at NAB will be no longer necessary.

And speaking of the future, QuickTime 6 offers support for MPEG-4. At its sweet spot around 300Kbps, the MPEG-4 encoded files look fantastic, which means our images are going to look better on more machines. That's because QuickTime's architecture is scalable, meaning that images streaming in MPEG-4 will always be optimized for the individual viewer's connection speed. This means no more having to settle for low-resolution files to accommodate the lowest 56K denominator.

From a shooter's perspective, the advent of MPEG-4 portends a spate of new opportunities (and challenges) for streaming images to cell phones and mobile PDAs. Understanding the capabilities and nuances of QuickTime puts us in a much better position to exploit these new venues. It also foretells greater flexibility in shooting web videos. Gone will be the days of locked-down cameras and static talent. The freedom that shooters have always enjoyed in other realms will finally extend to ordinary web programming, as QuickTime vies with Windows Media 9 to change the way images are distributed.

It is sobering to think that Internet broadcasting capabilities could soon be in the toolbox of every DV shooter. And consider that FireWire will soon be standard on HD cameras. Faithless studio execs sipping their lattes miles from the set will be able to monitor and second-guess every move we make on their Palm Pilots or laptops. Isn't technology lovely?

In the professional world we shoot in, the need to compress, handle, synchronize, and otherwise manipulate huge digital files is a reality of daily life. That QuickTime is the engine that drives so many of the tools we use (and will use) every day is testimony to the technology's inherent power and versatility. It is also proof that shooters can't afford to ignore the emerging web broadcasting standards, just as we can't afford to ignore the proliferation of DVD.

QuickTime will continue to evolve as the currency of digital media. Now, go pick up some of that currency.

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Sidebars

The QuickTime Pyramid

The QuickTime engine powers many of the familiar applications we use each day. With the application layer riding simply atop the QT architecture, third-party developers can more easily revise existing products or develop new ones.

APPLICATION LAYER Apple FCP, Adobe After Effects, Discreet Cleaner, Sonic DVDit!, etc.

MOVIE TOOLBOX (Cropping, Rotating, Zooming, etc.)

STANDARD USER INTERFACE (QT Controller/Dialogue/Preview)

SYNCHRONIZATION SERVICES MEDIA HANDLER (Video, MIDI, MPEG, etc.)

DATA HANDLER (CD-ROM, DVD, etc.)

IMAGE COMPRESSION MANAGER (CinePak, Sorenson, JPEG, MPEG-4, etc.)

SOUND MANAGER — MEDIA CAPTURE

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Quicktime Supported File Formats

Import file formats

3DMF, AIFF, AU, Audio CD Data (Macintosh), AVI, BMP, Cubic VR, DLS, DV, FlashPix, FLC, GIF, JPEG/JFIF, Karaoke, MacPaint, Macromedia Flash 5, MIDI, MPEG-1, MP3 (MPEG-1, Layer 3), M3U (MP3 Playlist files), MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Photoshop, PICS, PICT, PLS, PNG, QuickTime Image File, QT Movie, SF2 (SoundFont 2), SGI, Sound, Targa, Text, TIFF, TIFF Fax, Virtual Reality (VR), Wave

Export formats

AIFF, AU, AVI, BMP, DV Stream, FLC, Image Sequence movie exporters, JPEG/JFIF, JPEG 2000 (Mac OS X only), MacPaint, MIDI, MPEG-4, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, QuickTime Image, QuickTime Movie, SGI, System 7 Sound, Targa, Text, TIFF, WAV

Video codecs

Animation, Apple BMP, Apple Video, Cinepak, Component video, DV and DVCPRO NTSC, DV PAL, DVCPRO PAL, Graphics, H.261, H.263, JPEG 2000 (Mac OS X only), Microsoft OLE (decode only), Microsoft Video 1 (decode only), Motion JPEG A, Motion JPEG B, MPEG-4, Photo, JPEG, Planar RGB, PNG, Sorenson Video 2, Sorenson Video 3, TGA, TIFF

Sound codecs

24-bit integer, 32-bit floating point, 32-bit integer, 64-bit floating point, AAC (MPEG-4 Audio), ALaw 2:1, IMA 4:1, MACE 3:1, MACE 6:1, MS ADPCM (decode only), QDesign Music 2, Qualcomm PureVoice, ULaw 2:1

Video effects

Alpha gain, Blur, Brightness, Color style, ColorSync, Color tint, Contrast, Edge detection, Emboss, Film noise, General convolution, HSL balance, Lens flare, RGB balance, Sharpen, SMPTE Effects, Travelling Matte, Zoom

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