Apple Final Cut Pro 6 - Manual (Page 1715)

232 Part III Output
Formats Supported by QuickTime
QuickTime supports a lot of media formats and codecs, with many more coming all the
time. Some examples of formats and codecs supported by QuickTime follow.
Movie File Formats
File formats are the overarching structure used to store data. Different movie file
formats place video and audio media in different parts of the file, as well as the
associated metadata. The most commonly used media file formats supported by
QuickTime are described below.
AVI
AVI, or Audio Video Interleave, is a PC-compatible standard for digital video. This file
type is no longer officially supported by Microsoft, but it’s still frequently used. The AVI
format supports fewer codecs than QuickTime for video and audio and is mainly useful
for Windows delivery of video for multimedia use.
DV Stream
DV Stream files multiplex audio and video together digitally on a DV videotape. These
files are primarily for use with iMovie. Final Cut Pro converts DV streams to QuickTime
movies with independent video and audio tracks during capture.
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 is a video standard used for modern digital video format, including digital
television broadcast and DVD.
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is an open standard video format intended for cross-platform, Internet, and
multimedia delivery of video and audio content.
QuickTime Movie
This is a general-purpose media format that can contain multiple video, audio, text, and
other tracks. This is the native file format used by Final Cut Pro for capturing and export.
Video Codecs Supported Within Video File Formats
A video codec is an algorithm for encoding video images in space (within a frame) and
time (across multiple frames) to compress the data requirements while still producing
an acceptable image. Not all codecs are supported by all file formats.
Uncompressed (None)
This isn’t really a codec, but a way of storing QuickTime movies with no compression at
all. Since applying compression generally results in video artifacts, no compression
guarantees the highest quality. Unfortunately, it also guarantees enormous file sizes,
and they will not play back in real time on most systems.