QuickTime 3 Documentation
This section discusses how you can exchange movies between applications on your Macintosh computer or between your Macintosh and other computers.
Working with QuickTime and applications that employ QuickTime, the user may cut, copy, and paste movies just like any other type of data. When your application performs a cut or a copy operation, the Movie Toolbox returns a movie. Use the Movie Toolbox's PutMovieOnScrap and NewMovieFromScrap functions to work with movies on the scrap.
Because a movie contains only references to its media data, it is small enough to put onto the scrap.
A QuickTime movie file typically stores a movie in the resource fork of the file. The data for this movie may reside in the data fork of the same file, or in other files. In fact, a movie file may have no data fork at all--all the data for a movie may reside in other files. This allows several movies to share the same data.
The data referenced by a media is always stored in the data fork of a file. Because a movie can contain more than one media, and each media in a movie can refer to a different data file, it follows that a single movie may refer to more than one data file.
The Movie Toolbox allows you to create a movie file that contains all of its movie data. Such files are called self-contained movie files . Self-contained movie files can be used to move a movie from one Macintosh computer to another.
The Movie Toolbox also accommodates operating systems that do not recognize files with more than one fork. In this case, you can create a movie file that stores the movie and all of its data in the data fork of the Macintosh file. You can then transfer that file to a computer that runs another operating system. For more information, see the chapter "Movie Resource Formats" later in this book.