CompuServe Thread

Ian, aren't the Mac QT and QTW (Windows) formats a little bit different?

Hi Ian! Thanks for the warning. All the mac people I know have runtimes installed (I thought it came as part of the mac system bundle), and I'm really hoping for some affordable (read very cheap) means of letting them see animations which I'm outputing as AVIs. I can imagine potential problems with compression loss, but it seemed to me (in my ignorance) that it should be possible to read and if necessary reconstruct an AVI, and output a Quicktime, without the expense and overhead of an editor. Razor does pretty much what I want in the editing department at the moment. I'm surprised such a utility isn't available and well known, but not as surprised as the mac people have been at what trueSpace can do on a peecee. BTW Liked the shots from the game . . . Derek.

Say, Ian? There was a change awhile back… distribution of the QTW runtime libraries is free now. The big obligation is to run the installation routines correctly, so that the DLLs go into the correct place — this was not a condition with QTW1.x. And for Terry, yes, a QT video created on Mac will not necessarily be able to be read on a QTW-equipped PC. The video file needs to be self-contained (no references to external media; "flattened") and also single-forked (move the header info from the Mac's resource fork to the tail of the a/v stream in the data fork, so that it can be read on a variety of platforms). Thanks for passing the word on Premiere, Ian… one caveat is to watch how audio and video are interleaved in those two formats. AVI has a 1:1 interleave and is frame-based, while QT is more flexible and its data can have a range of interleaves, depending on tasks at hand. The two formats do have an underlying structural difference. But Derek, for a low-cost option of making your existing AVI files available to Macfolk, check in Microsoft's WINMM forum to see whether they have their AVI -> QTM utilities up there, or whether they're being given away on their current developers' CDs. Another resource may be Nels Johnsons' TRMOOV.EXE utility that was in his book on digital video… should be available in your local bookstore. I've heard of mixed results, but it may work in this case. (One final tip: if destination is a Mac, make sure that the Mac's four-letter file type is changed to "MooV" in ResEdit or a similar tool… this is a standard issue when going from PC to Mac.) Good luck! Regards, John Dowdell Macromedia Tech Support