Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 1579)

228 Part III Output
The QuickTime Suite of Software Applications
When someone mentions QuickTime, people often think of the free media player
developed by Apple. However, QuickTime is much more than just that. QuickTime
comprises a suite of applications that allow you to play, edit, and manipulate your
media. The QuickTime software includes:
 QuickTime Player: Apple’s free easy-to-use application for playing, interacting with,
or viewing video, audio, virtual reality (VR), or graphics files that are compatible
with QuickTime.
 QuickTime Pro An enhanced version of QuickTime Player that provides an abundance
of media authoring capabilities. With it, you can create movies, play movies full
screen, save files from the Internet, edit audio and video, add special effects, create
slideshows, and convert and save video, audio, and images to more than a hundred
standard file formats.
Additional QuickTime video streaming software is also available. Some of this
software is available as free downloads or already installed with Mac OS X; other
components are available for a fee. For details, go to Apple’s QuickTime website:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime .
QuickTime for Media Authoring
Using an application like QuickTime Player Pro, or Final Cut Pro, you can import, edit,
and export every file format that QuickTime supports. This allows you to create movies
for the web, DVD, or for output to videotape. You can also create movies including
video, audio, text, still images, and interactive layers.
The QuickTime Movie File Format
The QuickTime movie file format, often abbreviated to QuickTime file, is a special file
format that contains multiple tracks for storing different kinds of media. Don’t confuse
this special movie file format with other files that are simply QuickTime-compatible
formats. Examples of QuickTime-compatible file formats include AIFF, MP3, MPEG, WAVE,
JPEG, and TIFF, just to name a few. A QuickTime movie file uses a .mov file extension.
Important: Because QuickTime recognizes so many media file formats, you may notice
that a lot of media files in the Finder have a QuickTime icon, or the QuickTime Player
application may launch when you double-click the icons. To be accurate, these files are
called QuickTime-compatible files, but they are not necessarily QuickTime movie files.
For example, an AIFF file is a QuickTime-compatible audio file format; it is not a
QuickTime movie file.