A couple of QuickTime related tips from The Digidesign User conference.... Quickest bounce to QT choice 'michael c' asked... I'm a composer and I need to constantly bounce cues to QT so the producer/director can see how the music is playing under their film. I use the H264 codec and the bounce time for even a 30 to 45 second cue takes forever. Is there another choice that I can use that will still be top quality and yet not take so long to bounce? I am using an 8 core Mac Pro Tower with PT8.04 HD. 'rafukyo' replied suggesting.... There are 2 ways: Use the 3 modifires (cntrl+alt+cmd) and click the bounce to quicktime menu. Now you get a menu for changing the bounce settings. You can change the selection in the video section to faster encoding. Bounce the audio to quicktime format AAC. open the created file with quicktime pro. select all the timeline and copy it. Open the original video file click cmnd J and delete the original sound track. now go to edit menu and select "add to movie". it will paste the audio file to the video file. now you can save them as new file. 'minister' added... Quickest way is just to bounce it out as a Quicktime and don't convert it. Then convert it in QT Pro. This way, you can continue working. What codec are you using in Pro Tools? kd_special agreed... Yeah I would use this option. I didnt know you could have those Export options in PT for the last few years I had always sent My QT file with my mix to the Machine room to be converted down to an email size vid for client approval. It was a timly processd. Thanks god somone mentioned it to me. and the second QuickTime tip... Importing 4 ch audio from quicktime 'nucelar' asked..... I'm testing a setup where i would do following: Capture a quicktime movie (Motion JPEG codec) with 4 audio channels (PCM, 48k, 16bits) Import said movie and its 4 audios in Pro Tools LE (8.0.3, OSX 10.6.2) and spot everything to place. The mov files I capture are just fine, when I audition the separate channels in quicktime Pro I hear what is supposed to be on each channel. The problem is when Pro Tools imports the audio, it does some kind of mixing and I get two pairs of identical files, not the four discrete channels. Has anyone experienced similar behaviour? or is it a bug? For the record, with two channels everything's fine. 'diamondschwin' replied... I dont think Pro Tools handles more than 2 channel quicktimes. you would have to splits out the audio outs of PT and import it 'nucelar' responded... Thank you, but I don't quite understand what you mean... My solution for now is to open the mov in quicktime Pro and extract & export the 4 individual audio tracks to wavs. Then import these in Pro Tools. During "Import Video", Pro tools indeed "sees" the four audio tracks inside the mov, and actually creates four individual tracks for them, but the contents of these is all messed up. 'quadraphonics' confirmed... We do this all of the time. We have up to 8 channels in a Quicktime (HDCAM SR captured via SDI into Final Cut) When importing PT asks which audio tracks to import. Never had it mux the audio together such as you are describing. FWIW, we are running PT 7.2 and 7.3, not 8 'mikevarela' confirmed the problem and solution... Ran in to the same problem once. PT actually blended the audio of 2 channels. Had to extract the audio from quicktime, then import them into PT.

Ian Palmer asked about this on the Digidesign User Conference recently. He asked... I've been exporting mixes for review as a QT for years now. We've just upgraded my mix studio to PT8 HD. Before you would export the QT, set the audio settings and it would stitch the audio onto whichever QT was online in the session. Easy and quick. Now it's taking a bloody age as PT is re-encoding the H264 QT into another H264 QT instead of simply copying it. Am I missing something here? The new options window is identical to QTPro (which I have QTPro7 installed). I'm not using the H264 QT in my session, other than to export to as it's then uploaded via FTP. Can't be doing that with a 5Gb DVPAL version. 'FajitaTone' replied suggesting the flowing alternative workflow.... bounce to .wav close Pro Tools Session open QuickTime with QT Pro open .wav with QuickTime select all, and copy to clipboard (from the .wav file) switch to movie, type (cmd-J) to open the movie properties window select the audio track and delete it. then press opt-cmd-V to past the bounced .wav into the movie cmd-shift-S to save as self contained. this will save the QT you used in your PT session with bounced audio from the session. Bounce to QuickTime takes too long. I hope that was clear. Audio_Vision added... +1 to the method explained above. Fast and easy. Only issue is when picture has a leader or slate. I usually trim the picture first so the FFOA is the same for picture and exported/bounced .wav files. 'nucelar' responded... Hmm, in my case bounce to QuickTime takes just as long as bounce to wav, real time that is. It just replaces the audio in the movie without reencoding. UNLESS you choose Bounce to QuickTime with cmd-alt-ctrl pressed. Then you can specify the codec. Fajita's workflow is also very useful, specially when you only need to consolidate rather than bounce. The only thing I may add is that you must make sure that the consolidated or bounced audio is the exact same length as the movie, or at least starts at the same point. mikevarela added... Yes, bounce to QT is a BOUNCE (real time), benefits of course are that the audio chain runs through your automation and plug-ins. But, if you've already bounced the audio, then the tip above will work fine. Keep in mind though that it's not always sync accurate, as you're matching audio to video via command, not by eyes. If the video AND audio are EXACT same length, then you're good. (read).. there is also a way to nudge audio in the tip above, but it's not as easy and accurate as in PT

Recently there have been two threads on the Digidesign User Conference on this subject. One asking about the best codec to put the least strain on the host CPU usastra asks I have a session for a live concert with a quicktime movie using the H264 codec. When the movie is online it crashes very often, especially if I set the cursor to a new place in the timeline. If the movie is offline PT is way more stable (though still with the occasional crash).. I was wondering if the session could be made more stable if I render the movie with a different codec and which codec would be best so I would have the least CPU strain? The other commenting on the load playing an mp4 file has on the host CPU. Roger Stauss asked... I've been using an Mp4 vid to ease the up/download time. The PT session runs with some latency. It's very smooth with a QT DV. Is there a way to smooth out the session operation? (I run Video on separate drive) I have compiled the best responses from both threads below... Chief Technician advised simply... Use the DV codec. c.evans agreed... Agreed. The DV codec works well on my system, but what really helped is adding the Canopus ADVC 110 and sending my video out to an external monitor. Also, it is very important that your video is playing from a separate drive than your audio. I even use the internal SATA buss for my video when using firewire for video. It also helps to have a third party PCI firewire card to add some beef and options to your system. Craig F chipped in... mp4 is a intraframe codec same as h264 hence heavy CPU usage. José Luis Díaz explained... Always choose intraframe codecs (DV, Motion JPEG-A, Photo JPEG, etc). Always avoid interframe codecs (H264, Sorenson, etc). Interframes codecs demand much more brute force from CPU than intraframe codecs. Intraframe codecs only compress the data of one frame regardless any adjacent frame. But to decode a simple interframe stream of frames (like H264) the CPU of your computer will dedicate a lot of its cycles just for that simple moving image because it must to compute differences and similarities between frames. Check all this with Activity Monitor App. Play a PT session with an interframe movie. Them the same with a intraframe movie. Jon_Atkinson added.... Digidesign Technical Support have gone on record here a few times saying that H264 has been the root of many PT related QT problems. "A can of worms" was, I believe, the phrase used.... usastra responded... Thanks for all the replies! For now, I have converted the videos to mjpegB and the session runs much smoother! I will experiment with other codec later. philip888 asked.... What are you using to convert with? usastra replied.... Quicktime Pro Rick Sanchez confirmed.... A couple of solutions I found that worked well for me. 1. Once you've downloaded the video, use Quicktime Pro to transcode it to DV. If you have a fast computer, it's pretty quick to do. Usually much quicker than the download time. 2. Tell the editors to send you Motion JPEG A video instead of MP4/H.264. It's still very small and plays well with ProTools. One of the falsehoods about H.264 is that it is not a frame accurate format. This is not really the case. It can have a variable frame rate, but that is a setting when you do the original encode/capture. What it is, is a long GOP (Group of Pictures) format. Much like Mpeg2. In the first frame, all of the pixels are captured. In between the first (key) frame the next (user selectable) key frame, the computer looks for differences between the the Key frame and the next frame and only encodes anything that has changed. If the pixels (say a non-moving background) stay the same from frame to frame, it just fills in the blank with already captured pixels. Then when the next Keyframe comes around again (I think the default is 24) it captures all of the pixels and starts over. It's much like creating an audio ambiance fill track for a scene. You only need a few seconds of fill and then you loop it until there is the next change in ambiance. I take no credit to the advice I have quoted here but do confirm it from my own experience.

How many times have you been sent a Quicktime movie and it hasn't got burnt in timecode because the video editor hasn't got time to render one out.Well I recently came across two options to resolve this.Toki Software’s Toki TC v1.4.1Toki TC is an utility for displaying a time code, a feet+frames counter, a frame counter and a line of text over a movie. It has all options to control the display of the counters and text:Position of the counters in the picture,Set the start offset and frame rate,Choice of the font and size of the text,Left, center or right alignment,Choice of the colors of the text and the background.A movie can be exported with time code, counters and text to QuickTime, DV, MPEG-4, AVI and other formats.It runs under Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista.The full license is 15.90 € or $ 19.90For more info go to the Toki web siteQT Sync v0.3.3QT Sync is a QuickTime movie player that can do a load more useful stuff too.Watch your movies in Full ScreenCorrect Audio/Video Sync problems "on-the-fly"Works also great with Airfoil. Visit the FAQ page to learn more.Change the Aspect Ratio of movies without losing quality (No re-encoding needed.)Combine movies which have been split into several partsCrop the movie.Insert a text track with TimeCode or Feet+Frames information into the movie.Price - freeFor more info and to download it go to the QTSync web site