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The Quicktime 7 Pro controls let you do almost anything, but figuring out what they do or even where they are can be a chore in itself. Many do not appear until you open a movie, many more don't appear until you try to do something.
I'll start with exporting a file, you will do this when you want to change the format, reduce the file size, or who knows what else.
When you open Quicktime Pro, all you see is the player, the movie editing controls aren't available. But of course! With no movie to edit, you have no need of controls. So, first you open a file.
To
Click on File
Click on Open File
This should show you the last Folder you looked at for a file, you can look in different folders if you're not in the right one.
Highlight the movie you want to open (a very small one!) and click on Open
OR Double click on it to open
To compress the file, well, there's gobs of options. Here's one way that should compress your file, with so many options, you can fine tune it later.
Stop the movie
Click on File
Click on Export, you can only compress one movie at a time, so if you have one in process Export will be grayed out.
You will be compressing the movie you opened, so pick a different name to save the compressed version to, so you won't lose the original.
At the very bottom you have several speeds to compress at, where it says Use, it's in that drop down box. Try Broadband Low, it worked well for me on my first movie, and since it's in the mid speed range you can go either way later.
Click on Options just to the right of that, don't make any changes yet, just look at it and click on OK.
Click on Settings at the top and look at the maximum speed and frames per second, you can change this in future compressions and see the differences.
Click on OK
Click on size, it should have a width of 120, which is pretty small. Good for a first run, but you can make it bigger later. Add 24 to the height for the player controls to display if you want to put it on your website.
Click on OK.
Make sure you have a different filename.
Click on Save, and wait. I hope you picked a small movie, just a few megabytes. That 69 Megabyte movie of the cows took hours to compress on my old laptop, so learn how it's done with little movies first. You'll want to try different things and it's hard to wait a long time for results.
When it's done (the Progress box will disappear), you can open your new file in a new player and watch it. When you open it, hold your mouse over the file name to see the file size. You can have the old version and the new one open at the same time, side by side, but I can only play one at a time (there may be a way to play two, but I haven't figured it out yet).
By changing only one thing at a time you will learn what the control settings do to your movie.
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There are many more controls, to be covered later. Try changing one thing and export it again to see what happens, sometimes changing one thing also changes another, or allows more options to appear. It's really quite complex.
Next: How to show your movie on your website
Quicktime 7 Pro index
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