In
February 1992
Dr. Larry Loeb wrote up the not-yet-generally-available Apple QuickTime:
Apple's QuickTime to Make Its Mark This Year
by Larry Loeb
QuickTime, the Apple protocol for the handling of time-variant data such as animation and video, is conceptually interesting, but not much has been available for users to evaluate what all the
excitement is about. With Apple gearing up to make QuickTime generally available at January's MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, the mainstream of users should get a firsthand look at what was reportedly one of the technologies that most intrigued IBM executives when the two companies began talking last summer about their historic partnership.
Apple developers have had alpha and beta versions of QuickTime available to them since last May. WordPerfect and Acius announced last August that their products will be revised to support QuickTime movies (as QuickTime data is called) embedded in documents. But those revised programs haven't been released yet.
The QuickTime architecture, which requires a 68020 or higher to run, is a scalable one that includes features that are not immediately obvious. Currently optimized for 16-bit color (which is ample for most of the colors in the NTSC video spectrum), the architecture allows data to be displayed with a standard window size of 160 by 120 pixels, or roughly a fif
th the size of a Mac screen. The window size can vary, but current Apple-supported compressors/decompressors are optimized for this window size. Smaller windows make the data transfer rates more manageable, which means faster window refreshing.
One of the more flexible features of QuickTime is that movies can contain multiple video and audio tracks so that versions of video data can be optimized for and played back on different hardware platforms. QuickTime's Component Manager checks to see what hardware resources are available and can alter display parameters to best fit the system. The Component Manager also supports multiple audio tracks for different languages in the same movie.
The first QuickTime applications expected to be available are editors that let you create QuickTime movies. Apple has distributed demonstrations of some of these programs with the developer-only beta version of the QuickTime CD. Indeed, Apple distributed HyperCard XCMDs on the QuickTime CD, letting HyperCard serve as a rec
ord/playback vehicle for QuickTime.
Most editors (e.g., SuperMac's ReelTime, which was bought by Adobe and renamed Premiere) record and play back data that is compressed/decompressed on the fly. An exception to this is the DIVA Videoshop program, which records directly to a hard disk without compression for postproduction choice of compression. The $595 program can also use image filters from Adobe's Photoshop, as well as its own preset transition libraries, to manipulate video. Other editors are more specialized (e.g., Light Source's VideoSequencerQT, a $595 editor/control program made for recording QuickTime movies on NEC's PC-VCR). VideoSequencerQT is based on MovieTime, a QuickTime editor from Light Source that was present on the developer beta CDs.
Within the next six months, multifunction boards for QuickTime will appear that will probably have a video digitizer/capture function, a compression accelerator, and possibly a VCR controller (à la Sony's V-Box, which serves as an interface betw
een computers and Sony consumer products, or Light Source's application for NEC's PC-VCR). Such a board would allow for larger movie displays without the performance hits. You can also expect "content providers," such as Disney, Warren New Media, and ABC Interactive, to make waves in the QuickTime field.
QuickTime is an exciting technology for those who have the required hardware to support it, especially memory and hard disk space. Apple hopes that QuickTime will "raise the bar" on what is expected of personal computing.
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