QuickTime 3.0 Pro for Windows 95

Emedia Professional,  Sept, 1998  by Robert J. Boeri

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First released in 1991, Apple Computer, Inc.'s QuickTime is a key standard for cross-platform digital media creation and publishing. In fact, if you've loaded the full Acrobat product suite from Adobe Systems, or even Acrobat Reader from a CD-ROM, you've already loaded an earlier version of QuickTime. The latest version, QuickTime 3.0 Pro, combines advanced digital video streaming technologies with major breakthroughs in userfriendliness.

Particularly impressive is QuickTime's enduring market presence as the only digital media technology platform integrating 3D animation, real-time special effects, virtual reality, and streaming video and audio across all major operating systems. The product currently supports more than 35 popular media file formats, including most major video, still image, audio, animation, and MIDI formats. Multimedia producers in particular should heed the fact that QuickTime's file format has been chosen as the starting point for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) MPEG-4 Intermedia Format.

THE LATEST PLETHORA OF POSSIBILITIES

To get QuickTime 3.0 Pro into as many hands as possible, Apple has been giving away a downsized version of the product on its Web site--http://www.apple.com/quicktime/ download. To further reduce its distribution costs, and for the sake of convenience, the company allows the user to download upgrades as well. For $29.99, you'll receive an access key that activates version 3.0's capabilities. You may also purchase a Macintosh, Windows 95, or Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM of the product for an additional $10 media and shipping fee. Aside from avoiding the download time of the 6.8MB QuickTime installer, though, there seems little reason to do this, especially since the contents of the CD-ROM mirror the downloadable product.

What you don't get with the product--and what would have been intensely helpful--is a manual or integrated HELP. I found this omission to be a significant roadblock, especially for the first-time Windows QuickTime user, since there is such an overwhelming number of features to assimilate and learn. Apple does provide a comprehensive primer on the Web, but it doesn't take the place of online HELP or a PDF rendition of the manual.

PUTTING QUICKTIME 3.0 PRO'S MAIN FEATURES TO THE TEST

What gives QuickTime real value is the sheer number of file types and compressor-decompressors (codecs) that are built-in and supported. Specifically, version 3.0 handles AVI, DV, and OpenDML video formats; AIFF/AIFC, DV, Sound Designer II, System 7 sound, AU, and WAV audio files; animated GIF, FLC, FLI, and PICS files; Karaoke, standard, and general MIDI formats; and a host of still image file formats, including BMP, GIF, JPEG/JFIF, MacPaint, PhotoShop, PICT, SGI, Targa, and TIFF.

Once downloaded, QuickTime 3.0 Pro-tested here on a 200MHz Pentium running Windows 95--provides three applications: Picture Viewer, Movie Player, and a browser plug-in.

Picture Viewer

QuickTime 3.0 Pro's Picture Viewer warrants a position in your arsenal of Web and multimedia-delivery tools because it handles major Web graphic file formats. Designed to accept multiple graphics formats, the viewer also exports a variety of file types. Viewer even lets you perform minor graphics editing, such as sizing and rotating.

In testing, I easily read a bi-tonal TIF image of an ink sketch into the Viewer and exported it to JPEG--a feat even higher-end tools such as Photoshop LE and Painter cannot achieve. The Viewer also allows you to specify quality settings for JPEG to achieve the best file size for the image clarity you want. Adding GIF and transparent GIF would make the tool even more useful for Web graphics editing.

Movie Player

Strictly speaking, the name "Movie Player" is a misnomer. The player delivers video--plus sound, graphics, text, and any media type the movie contains--as single components or in a variety of configurations. Movie Player currently supports two types of movies: serial time-based and Virtual Reality (VR), a heuristic exploratory medium mimicking three dimensions.

Movie Player stores media types in separate tracks, which can be manipulated individually and played back synchronized. The major QuickTime tracks include video (digitized or computer-generated images, or both), sound, music (MIDI), text, 3D, tween (used with 3D to define object motions), and Sprite (graphic objects you can move and resize for integration with video). QuickTime's VR movies must contain at least a video track; VR panorama movies also contain a Panorama track.

QuickTime 3.0 provides very efficient and high-quality delivery of sound and video via its built-in codecs in both the Macintosh and Windows versions. Video codecs include PhotoJPEG, Sorenson, and Cinepak; music includes the QDesign Music Codec, which gives Web publishers a means to publish streaming sound at higher quality than available via other streaming formats. One built-in speech codec is QUALCOMM's PureVoice, which allows Web content providers to deliver high-quality, voice-based content to Internet users at any modem connection speed.