Making a movie with self contained player
Compressing a movie with Quicktime Pro 7
How to embed your movie in a web page
Effect of changing data rate
Editing a movie, Dominoes
The Sailing Texas Truck, a video converted to Flash, which works much better.
My camera, a Panasonic DMZ LZ2, was about $200 new and takes movies with sound in the MOV format, compatible with Quicktime. I bought QuickTime Pro 7 and started learning how to use it to compress the movies. It's hard to find something on the net with instructions, partly because I'm so new I don't understand what they're saying half the time. So I started this section right away, to record some of my discoveries and mistakes. Some of it is probably the wrong way to do something, for I'm just a beginner, but maybe another beginner will find it useful in learning QuickTime Pro 7.
I couldn't move the movies from the camera to the PC with my photo program, Photoshop Elements, but by opening two copies of My Documents and going to the correct folder I was able to drag and drop the files from the camera to the hard drive.
To find the camera files, move up directories to My computer, double click External Drive, double click DCIM, and then double click the PANA folder your movies are in on the camera card. The LZ2 makes two files with the same number, one a jpg and one a mov, the jpg is the first frame of your movie. Drag both to the new folder you made for these movies. You need Quicktime installed to view these movies, version 6 will play them, but I downloaded Quicktime 7.04. FREE Quicktime Player Download. Quicktime 7 in some ways isn't as good as Quicktime 7, several features have been deleted for some reason.
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So I had movies on the hard drive, and I'd downloaded the 34 megabytes of Quicktime version 7 so I can watch the movies on the computer. Progress! Enter the HUGE FILE SIZE gremlin. This clip I took to learn with lasts 2 minutes and 25 seconds at 30 frames per second and the file size was 69 Megabytes! On my slow dialup connection, it would take 6 hours to download this two minute clip, useless for the internet. I started looking for a way to reduce the file size, and found Quicktime Pro 7, which is just $29.95 from Apple. It sounded good so I bought it.
After a few hours of study, I had the clip at left. With Quicktime Pro I've reduced the file size from 69 MB to 1.6MB, and it's running at 15 fps instead of the 10 fps on the previous page. Adding 50% more frames did not change the file size at all, how interesting. Can you see any difference? This one loads but waits for you to start it because I put autoplay=false in the embed command, you can see the file loading in the controller at the bottom, and it will play when you click on the play triangle. If you want the movie to start right away use autoplay=true in the embed command.
2 minute 25 second clip, file size reduced from 69 MB to 1.6 MB, 15fps, Broadband low, H.264 compression, sound isn't very good at the Broadband Low default settings.
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