Road Map to QuickTime 3

Movie Toolbox: Time and Spatial Characteristics

This chapter describes the functions of the Movie Toolbox that your application can use to manipulate the timebase and spatial characteristics of movies, tracks, and media. Most QuickTime developers will need to be familiar with these functions.

Working With Movie Spatial Characteristics

Inside Macintosh describes a number of functions that your application can use to determine and change the display characteristics of movies and tracks. These functions affect the movie's graphics world, its matrix, the final display coordinate system, and the display boundaries. QuickTime 3 Reference adds three new functions which allow you to work with color tables and to set the graphics world of an individual track.

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Creating a track matte

Inside Macintosh contains a listing of a program that creates a video track matte. A matte is a defined region that can be clipped and filled with other footage. In the process of creating a track matte, the sample program manipulates several spatial characteristics of the movie.

Matrix Functions

Inside Macintosh describes the Movie Toolbox functions that allow you to manipulate transformation matrices. See About Movies for a description of transformation matrices.

Working with Movie Time

Inside Macintosh describes the functions used to work with a movie's time parameters. Included are functions for retrieving the time base, working with the current movie time, working with the time scale, calculating the movie's duration, and getting and setting the playback rate. Functions that act on track time and media time are defined in subsequent sections.

Working With Track Time

Inside Macintosh describes the functions that work with a track's time parameters. All tracks share the movie's time base, but each track contains its own offset and duration. A function is also provided to translate track time into a value appropriate to the track's media, which can also be used to test for edits that are empty.

Working With Media Time

Inside Macintosh describes the functions that work with a media's time parameters. Each media has its own time scale and duration.

Finding Interesting Times

Inside Macintosh describes the functions used to search a movie, track or media for a particular sample, such as a keyframe. The functions return the time and duration of the next sample that meets the search criteria.

Time Base Functions

Inside Macintosh discusses the various Movie Toolbox functions that work with time bases. A QuickTime time base defines the time coordinate system for a movie. It can also be used to provide general timing services.

 

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