Theater Maker is shareware, if you use it regularly, please send $10 to:
Mark Adams
11215 Research Blvd. #2036
Austin, TX 78759
Any comments/bugs can be sent to MarkA38 on America Online or Maverick.Sft on AppleLink.
INSTRUCTIONS
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Theater Maker lets you make standalone QuickTime movies(called Theaters) that automatically play themselves when you double click on them. Even cooler than that, you can have the movies play themselves as part of a larger picture, so the movie is framed by a background. I've included a few backgrounds with the Theater Maker, and you can make your own if you are familiar with ResEdit(look at the bottom of this document for instructions). Making a movie into a Theater adds about 10k plus the size of a Frame PICT to the movie file.
If you just want to use Theater Maker to change your QuickTime movies to standalone "Theaters", its easy:
First, run the Theater Maker applcation and choose "Create Theater" from the File menu. A dialog will appear that lets you set the following options for creating a movie:
•"Movie" - click to select the QuickTime movie file to convert.
•"Frame" - click to select the Frame file you want to be the background for your movie theater. If you don't want a frame, just leave it as "None Selected" and the movie will be played on a black background.
•"Crop Movie to Frame" & "Resize Movie to Frame" - These two options tell Theater Maker what to do with a movie that isn't the exact same size as the movie area in a Frame.
If you choose "Crop", one of two things will happen- If the movie is smaller than the area it will be played in, it will be shown at normal size and centered in the area. If the movie is larger than the Frame area, it will be shown at normal size but some of the edges of the movie may be clipped away.
If you choose "Resize", the movie will be played back so that it is resized(if needed) to the exact area in the Frame. This looks best, but can make the movie playback slow or choppy. Cropping the movie is usually faster.
•"Loop movie" - Checking this causes the movie to play constantly until you click the mouse.
•"Convert in place" - If you convert the movie in place, the ORIGINAL movie file will be changed to a Theater applciation. This is a lot faster than converting it to another file, and doesn't require extra disk space. If you want to keep your original movie intact, don't check convert in place, and you'll be asked for the file name & place to save the converted movie.
PLAYING THEATERS
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To play a Theater, just double-click it! You can adjust the volume of the sound with the + and - keys, or by hitting the number keys 0-9. Click the mouse to stop the movie and quit at any time.
If you have a Theater application you want to convert back to just a plain movie file,
just double-click it while holding down the Cmd(Apple) key. This removes all the extra stuff from the file and changes it back to a 'MooV' document.
MAKING YOUR OWN FRAMES
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Currently the only way to make your own frame is to use ResEdit. But its really not that hard. All you really need is a PICT that you want to use as a background. To make the PICTs really small, I recommend running them through a JPEG compressor like the PictCompressor on the QuickTime CD. After you have a PICT thats compressed, copy it to the clipboard, open ResEdit, and open a copy of one of the existing Frame documents.
Go into the PICT resources and delete the picture that is already there. Then Paste your picture in. Get info on the PICT and change its number to 32000. All you have to do now is supply the rectangle coordinates of where in the PICT you want the movie to play. There should be an 'nrct' resource in the Frame file, also #32000. Open it up, and type in the top, left, bottom, right coordinates in the picture that you want to play the movie in. You may have to play around with these numbers to get it to look right. After that, save the Frame file and quit ResEdit. You can now use your new Frame file on any movies you want to!
If you make any cool Frames, let me know, I'd love to see them!
