Movie Toolbox: Creating and Saving Movies

This chapter describes the functions of the movie toolbox that your application will use to create and save movies. This includes steps such as creating a file to hold the movie, creating tracks and media structures, adding sample data to media, and so on.

You will need to read this chapter if your application creates or saves movies. You should also be familiar with the " Movie Functions ."

Creating a Movie

Inside Macintosh shows how to create a new movie. A sample program is given, detailing the necessary steps: creating and opening a file to hold the movie, creating the tracks and media structures for audio and video, adding sample data, and adding movie resources to the file. Read this section to see a sample program that will step you through the procedure in tutorial fashion.

Creating Movies With Modifier Tracks

QuickTime 4 Reference shows how to create tracks that use their data to modify other tracks, instead of presenting their data directly. This can be used to create a wide variety of effects, such as panning audio or presenting video data as a sprite. Read this section if you plan to provide such effects in your application.

Manipulating Media Input Maps

QuickTime 4 Reference describes two functions you can use to maintain media input maps. The media input map of a track describes where its variable parameters (such as size, position and volume) are stored, so that modifier tracks know where to send their data.

Saving Movies in Movie Files

Inside Macintosh briefly describes saving movies into movie files. Saving a movie into a new movie file and saving movie contents to an existing movie file are both discussed.

Saving Movies

Inside Macintosh defines the functions used in saving a movie to a file. QuickTime 4 Reference describes changes to QuickTime that affect FlattenMovie and FlattenMovieData. This information is of interest to most developers.

Creating Tracks and Media Structures

Inside Macintosh describes the functions your application can use to create and dispose of tracks and media structures. These functions are used when creating movies, or when editing movies at the track level.

Working With Track References

QuickTime 4 Reference describes the functions that manipulate track references. Track references define relations between tracks. For example, a timecode track may be related to several other tracks, or a text track may contain subtitles for a particular audio track.

Working With Data References

Inside Macintosh describes the functions used to work with data references. Media structures point to their actual sample data using data references. For sound and video media, data references identify the files that contain the data. Media handlers also use data references in order to manipulate media data.

Working With Alternate Tracks

Inside Macintosh describes the functions your application can use to work with alternate tracks. Alternate tracks are used to create a single movie that can, for example, play back with different language audio tracks in different countries, or with different quality audio or video on different model computers.

Working With Media Samples

Inside Macintosh describes the functions your application can use to determine information about a movie's sample data, such as the size in bytes of the data in a movie, track, or media, or the number of samples in a media, or the media's sample description.

Adding Samples to Media Structures

Inside Macintosh describes several functions your application can use to directly manipulate media samples. QuickTime 4 Reference adds new functions to the list. Note that GetMediaSampleReferences and AddMediaSampleReferences are new plural forms to the original GetMediaSampleReference and AddMediaSampleReference, allowing you to work with multiple samples at once.

New:

Original:

Working With Movie User Data

Inside Macintosh describes the functions your application can use to work with movie user data. Each movie, track and media can contain a user data list, which can be used for any purpose you like. You can create new user data types using the format described in this section. Predefined user data types are listed, including fields for the movie's name, copyright notice, and various credits.