Inside Macintosh: QuickTime Reference

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Creating New Types of QuickTime Movies

Because embedded movies can have independent clocks, new types of movies can now be created.

For example, you can create a movie containing animated characters that are watching a video. This movie could contain an animation track, perhaps a sprite or Flash track, and an embedded movie track for the video content. In this example, the root movie's time base would control the animation, but the video's rate could be controlled independently from the animations' rate. Wired actions could be sent to the embedded movie when a user clicks on buttons in the animation track. The wired actions could play, pause, and fast forward the video, or switch to a new one.

Another way you can take advantage of independent time bases is to allow long audio tracks to be triggered interactively. For example, if you create a game with sound effects and background music that need to be played back at times defined by events that occur in the game, you can use an embedded movie for each audio track. The advantage of using an embedded movie instead of a music track with a custom sound is that the entire sound does not need to be loaded into memory, so it is appropriate for longer sounds. The disadvantage is that you may not control it similar to a MIDI instrument.


© 2000 Apple Computer, Inc.

Inside Macintosh: QuickTime Reference

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