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Happy Endings Todd Stauffer
(tstauffer@webintosh.com)
QuickTime 3.0: Good Timing?
Although I'm pretty sure Apple didn't plan it this way, the release of QuickTime 3.0 has coincided exactly with the week I've spent on digital video for my upcoming Mac book. So, I ended up deep in the specifications that Apple has posted on their Web site, crawling all over the 'net looking for information on the various codecs, and scrounging around for people's opinions on how things work. I've looked at the back side of AV file formats, folks, and lived to tell about it.
My conclusion? We're reaching a cross-roads in digital video for the masses, and QuickTime may very well lead the way.
Some of my excitement comes from just playing with the technology. Although I was the go-to guy in high school and college whenever someone wanted a videotaped funny bit, the waning years have found me distanced from video production and editing. Who has the time to sit in front of a couple of VCRs and try to time the record and play perfectly? Or, beyond that, who's going to pay me to do good enough work that it merits a digital editing workstation?
But what if the technology is coming around to change that? It's certainly starting to feel that way to to me -- especially since it keeps cropping up in my reading over the past few weeks.
Video Everywhere
Although I've been known in the past to accuse Mac Today magazine of preaching to the minister of music in their editorial, their latest issue offers an interesting digital video tidbit. Rod "Mac Daddy" Harlan talks about DV film festivals that are cropping up around the country, forcing me to think, there might be an audience for my patented chase scene after all. (You know, Tarantino has the guys-all-pointing-guns-at-each-other scene? I've got the same kinda thing. Stuff of legends.)
I also read recently another interesting piece where a reviewer spent a few weeks lugging an MPEG camera around for full-motion, stop-motion, audio editing and, apparently, checkbook balancing. Sounds like it's a tad expensive, but other solutions are lurking out there on the horizon, just waiting to be hooked up by FireWire or RCA jacks to your Mac for some quick digitizing and editing. And the equipment is priced right where laser printers were in the late 1980s. Maybe I can get my hands on something like that.
The Next DTP
It also helps that all these technologies seem to be converging at once. The G3s are here, with enough raw horsepower to do some good, real-time compression/decompression. FireWire is finally showing up at a consumer level. DV cameras are hitting the shelves in Best Buy. And QuickTime 3.0 has arrived, fulfilling an interesting promise that was implicit in Apple's announcement of the technology nearly a decade ago:
One day, Todd will understand what the heck QuickTime is for.
QuickTime 3.0
In fact, I believe this is an indicator that may end up having the resonance of Moore's Law or the S&P; 500 (which, frankly, I still don't quite get.) The moment one of Apple's technologies arrives on the scene in a version that makes sense to me, it's ready for prime time. I am the alpha consumer. (I hope most of this gets cut in editing.)
Anyway, QuickTime does finally make sense. It's not just a movie technology, and it's not just a programmers' API. It's a unifying technology that helps us make sense of the different components that go into creating multimedia. It's a standard based on dealing with many different standards and bringing them together. Best of all, it offers some patented Apple ease-of-use features.
I fully expect to see more action in the area of Premiere LE and such tools -- programs that make it easier to edit on a hobbyist level. This may seem ironic, since the QuickTime technology has gotten more powerful, if anything. But the power of QuickTime is exactly what can bring it to the foreground for consumer, as well as professional, pursuits.
There's also HyperCard. I'll be fascinated to see if it really will take on a new life with QuickTime as its master. I remember being at Boston MacWorld hearing about the HyperCard-QuickTime convergence and thinking to myself, "QuickTime this, QuickTime that. Why don't they just update HyperCard so that the color tools make sense?" Now I'm starting to see the light. HyperCard is high on my list of items to look more closely at over the next few weeks.
QuickTime Pro
Heck, even QuickTime Pro is too cool for words, even though it's a little limited at the moment. The implications are already pretty clear in a part of the world that I do know something about -- Web streaming. The Sorensen codecs alone are worth the price of admission and could go a long way to making digital audio and video over the Web a more interesting prospect.
Speaking of price, I've seen a little quibbling about the cost of QuickTime 3.0 Pro -- frankly, I don't see the point. It's a software application, after all, and one that does some pretty decently cool stuff. Aren't we supposed to pay for that sort of thing? I read some Don Crabb's* work earlier today that cleared up the whole licensing thing -- you only owe the fee if you included the QuickTime installer without including Apple's little ad that pushes the $30 Pro version. Cool enough.
Otherwise, I think QuickTime is poised to usher in a new era of convergence. (Just that line alone is gonna get Wired to reprint this story.) Seriously -- I think we'll all be a little more interested in creating cool digital stuff -- audio, video, streaming -- with this new level of QuickTime. It may even build the momentum of change as we cast about deperately looking for reasons to use all this burly PowerPC hardware that Apple is taunting us with.
The answer is video publishing for the masses. I don't know about you, but it looks like that the day I got interested in creating video is closer than I thought it was going to be.
* If I see Don Crabb pop up with one more column on the Web I'm going to stop by the University of Chicago and look into their cloning research lab. (I'm kidding. I envy the man. But do you think his Dean knows about all these columns he writes?)
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