Working with QuickTime Tracks
- Determining Which Tracks a Movie Contains
- Combining Tracks with the Add and Add Scaled Commands
- Extracting Tracks
- Deleting Tracks
- Disabling and Enabling Tracks
- Scaling a Track to a Specific Duration
- Setting Up Tracks with Alternate Languages
- Specifying a Language for a Track
- Designating a Set of Alternate Tracks
- Loading Tracks into Memory
Working with Tracks
In Chapter 6, you learned editing techniques that treat a movie as though it were a single entity, ignoring that a movie actually may be composed of separate tracks.
In this chapter, we'll show you how you can decompose a movie into its component media tracks, combine tracks to make a new movie, delete tracks, hide tracks, and scale individual tracks to a specific duration.
We'll also explain the process of assigning alternate languages to tracks.
Finally, we'll demonstrate how you can get slightly better performance by specifying how certain tracks can be loaded into memory.
Determining Which Tracks a Movie Contains
You don't have to do much to find out the number or type of tracks a movie contains.
To see which tracks a movie contains:
From the Movie menu, choose Get Movie Properties (Figure 7.1).
Figure 7.1 Choose Movie > Get Movie Properties to access information about the movie and its tracks.
In the Properties window for the movie, pull down the left pop-up menu (Figure 7.2). The items in the pop-up menu below the word Movie are the track names.
Figure 7.2 The left pop-up menu in the Movie Properties window lists the tracks in the movie.
In most cases, track names correspond to track types. A video track, for example, is listed as Video Track. Because track names can be edited, however, you may have to dig a bit deeper to determine the type of track.
To determine the track type if the track name doesn't correspond to a track type:
From the left pop-up menu in the Properties window, choose the track you're interested in.
From the right pop-up menu, choose General.
In the middle of the window, you'll find a Track Type listing (Figure 7.3).
Figure 7.3 If you choose a track and then choose General from the right pop-up menu, the track type is listed in the middle of the window. (This method is useful when a track's name isn't the same as its type.)
If you've opened an RTSP streaming movie, you'll probably see a single track listed in the left pop-up menu in the Properties window: Streaming Track. This track contains all the data from the original tracks that the movie was composed of before it was streamed to you. If Streaming Track is selected in the left pop-up menu, you can choose Format from the right pop-up menu to get a list of the media types contained in the movie.