MooVer is a simple utility that creates a QuickTime movie from a sequence of Macintosh Pict files or sound files dropped onto it. It is great for creating computer animations, slide shows, or batch-converting images or sounds into QuickTime movie format. MooVer works on 68020 or better Macintosh models, is accelerated for Power Macintosh models, requires at least System 7.0, and needs QuickTime version 1.6 or newer.
You can optionally "add subtitles" under each image frame. In this case, MooVer will subtitle each frame with text. It will either use the name of each Pict file, or, if there is a special "subtitle" text file in the same folder as the Pict files, MooVer will instead use each text line from this file as subtitles for each frame.
The display size of the overall movie is determined by the size of the first image dropped onto MooVer. All successive images, no matter what size they are, will be resized (scaled, not cropped) to fit the size of the first image.
MooVer can create QuickTime movies in either 256 colors (8-bit) or millions of colors (24-bit, or TrueColor.) If 256-color mode is used, then any 24-bit Pict images will first be reduced to 8 bits before their frames are added to the movie. You can optionally choose "256 colors dithered" which will generally do a better color-smoothing job than just "256 colors." This is independent of any QuickTime compression settings you choose.
MooVer supports the required AppleEvents, which allows it to be automatically controlled by AppleScript in a limited way.
MooVer is fully functional Shareware, which means all features are enabled for you to use... esp Software does not believe in "Crippleware." You may try the software a few times to see if it suits your needs. If you find it useful and continue to use it, you are asked to register it by sending a check or money order to esp Software for $10 USA.
I have enclosed a sequence of Pict files that you can select and drag onto MooVer to create a simple computer animated movie right away. I wanted to include an interesting set of frames for a sample movie, but at the same time I wanted to keep this archive small. I hope this is a reasonable compromise. Note to users of earlier versions, this is a brand new animation sequence, and a sound too!
So, here are the steps to create a QuickTime movie from the enclosed samples:
(A) From the Finder, Select all 8 Pict images, entitled "Bonk.0001" through "Bonk.0008", and the "Bonk.Snd" sound file, and drag them over and drop them onto the MooVer application icon when it hilights. If MooVer does NOT hilight, see the "Trouble-shooting tips..." section, item #1 below.
(B) If you have not registered yet, a "Please Register dialog" will appear, and in a few seconds you can click the "Not Yet" button to continue. See the "How do I Register..." section below to learn how to make this dialog go away permanently.
(C) Now the "MooVer Settings" dialog appears. This Settings dialog has three panels, each is selectable by choosing the "Settings" popup menu near the top of the dialog. The "Image" panel is displayed first, and allows you to change how the images are copied into MooVer. If you have a 256 color monitor or want to force the images down to 256 colors before they are compressed by MooVer, choose 256 colors. If you want to keep the highest quality as the images are processed, choose "Millions of colors". Now click the "Compression Settings" button, and for this example, choose the ANIMATION compressor with BEST DEPTH, and choose QUALITY:100 and MOTION:8 frames per second. Click OK, and you are back at the Settings dialog. You don't need to change anything else in here, but let's look at the other panels before we continue. Go to the Settings popup menu at the top of the dialog and choose SUBTITLES. Here you could add subtitle text under each frame if you wish. Now choose OUTPUT from the Settings popup. Here you can change to which application your final QuickTime movies belong. If you use Apple's MoviePlayer to play QuickTime movies, leave the Application Signature as TVOD. Otherwise, you could click the "Choose Application" button and search your hard disk for your favorite movie-player application. Let's get back to creating this movie. Click the Save button at the bottom of the dialog, and MooVer will remember and use these settings for your movies.
(D) Now you are prompted for a destination to save the output QuickTime movie. The initial QuickTime movie name is automatically built for you from the first file name dropped on MooVer. Click OK to save this movie as "Bonk Movie".
(E) A preview window will now appear, showing each image as the movie is generated. When MooVer is finished, it will beep. But wait... the movie has not been completely written yet, since you could still drop even more images on. The next step is very important!
(F) From MooVer's File menu, choose the Close or Quit item. This will finish up the movie and write it completely out to disk.
(G) That's it, you now have a Bonk Movie you can open and play in a QuickTime movie player! This particular movie was specifically designed to be viewed in an auto-repeat loop mode.
This animation sequence was created by a Freeware ray tracing application called POV-Ray Macintosh version 2.2. POV-Ray is available for the Macintosh and many other computer platforms. You can find the latest copy of this application on CompuServe (go GRAPHDEV), America On-line (keyword MGR or PGR), and the Internet (ftp/www to povray.org.) Also look for the book on the Macintosh version of POV-Ray, called "Ray Tracing for the Macintosh CD", published by Waite Group Press, ISBN 1-878739-72-7.) The original POV-Ray 2.2 scene source file that generated the frames is included, so that you may use it with POV-Ray to render a larger or smoother movie. The only credit given for the sound is that SoundEdit 16 can do wonderful things to a dessert bowl and a spoon.
If you do the same kind of movies over and over (or if you are running MooVer from AppleScript), you may wish to set up all the settings the first time, and then drop images on MooVer, and have MooVer just use the previous settings for all future movies without prompting you for anything. This is called Quiet Mode. To set it up, run MooVer, and choose the Settings item from the File menu to set up the settings the way you want. Don't forget to click the "Compression Settings" button and pick the QuickTime compression mode you desire. Close the movie, and select Settings from the File menu. Now turn off the checkbox called "Always prompt for these settings", and quit MooVer. MooVer will no longer prompt for anything, but will use your settings as defaults. Note that while in Quiet Mode, if an output movie already exists, you will NOT be prompted to replace it, it will automatically be overwritten. To turn Quiet Mode back off, just run MooVer, choose Settings from the File menu, and turn the "Always prompt..." checkbox back on.
You can use MooVer as a simple scriptable movie maker. First, run MooVer, and set up Moover in Quiet Mode, as described above. Next, simply send "open file" commands to it to add frames and sounds, and send a "quit" command to finish and save each movie. See the accompanying AppleScript file called "MooVerScript" as an example.
If you have the Subtitles checkbox off in the Settings dialog (the default), then a simple QuickTime movie will be generated, straight from the pictures. If you turn Subtitles on, then MooVer will overlay some text at the bottom of each frame. By default, MooVer will automatically put the name of each Pict file in the subtitle area for each frame. If you wish to have some subtitle text other than filenames under each image, you can create a subtitle file. The subtitle file must either be named "Subtitles", or it must be the name of the first PICT file, with any Pict file extension replaced by ".Sub". For example, if the first image was called "Red October.Pict" or "Red October.0001", then you'd need a Subtitle file called "Red October.Sub". This subtitle file must be in the same directory as the first Pict file, and will automatically be opened and read by MooVer... you do not drop it onto MooVer. The subtitle file is simply a text file, with each line holding text for the subtitle of that picture (First line goes onto the first frame, 2nd onto the 2nd frame, etc.) If a line is empty (no characters or spaces), the previous line is repeated in its place. If the end of the subtitle file is reached, but more pictures are added, MooVer will return to using their file names as subtitles.
Subtle subtitle technical note: Currently the subtitle text is imaged right into the image behind it (sometimes called "burnt text"), which means that any lossy compression will also affect the quality of the text, and scaling the movie during playback will scale the text in an ugly chunky way. A future version will split the text out as a separate text track for smoother scaling.
Currently, MooVer only accepts System 7 style sound files, that is, sounds like those dragged out of the system file. These are sound resource files of type 'sfil', and can also be created by many standard sound recording programs (for example, MacroMedia's SoundEdit 16/Pro). Currently, MooVer always adds the sound at the beginning of the movie, playing it alongside any image frames. Future versions may start the sound at the last image frame dropped in. It is perfectly acceptable (but questionable) to drop multiple sound files on MooVer, they will all be played simultaneously at the beginning of the movie. One useful side-effect is that they will be played as stereo, so if you separate your sounds into two files, you can create a stereo-sound movie this way.
The myriad details about the trade-offs of all the different QuickTime compression settings you can choose for your movies is beyond the scope of this document. However, I have found that for a good compromise of quality, compression, and speed of playback, the Animation compressor is quite good, as is the Video compressor. If you want very high compression and can stand some small loss in image quality, and you are playing the movie very slowly (as in a slide show), you may want to use the JPEG compression at about 70%. If you have a small number of simple colors in the movie, you should try the Graphics compressor. These are just starting hints; you will need to experiment with your particular input files and use what works best for you.
1. Quite a few people have found that unstuffing the MooVer 1.2 archive onto their Power Macintosh computers created a Moover application that would not let Pict files be dropped on it from the Finder. This has turned out to be a problem with the Finder's Desktop database not getting updated properly when MooVer was added to the hard disk. The way to fix this problem is to "Rebuild the desktop database." Here's how: (a) Restart your computer, and hold down the COMMAND and OPTION keys; (b) When the computer is about to display the Finder desktop, it will pop up a dialog asking "OK to rebuild the desktop for volume 'hd'?" (where 'hd' will be the name of your hard disk, or each partition.) (c) Let go of the COMMAND and OPTION keys, and click the OK button for each dialog. (d) When the Finder finally comes up, you should now be able to drop files onto MooVer without problems. Hopefully this was just a problem with the way MooVer 1.2 was packaged, and you won't experience this problem with this version.
2. When you drop some files onto MooVer and choose an output movie file to create, an empty movie file is generated, but it is not until you close or quit MooVer that the frames are actually written to this file. So always remember to choose Close before you copy the QuickTime movie to another disk, otherwise you will be copying an incomplete file.
3. MooVer currently allocates memory for sounds inside its application memory. This means that if you have a very large sound file, you must increase MooVer's application memory to hold the sound. Determine the size of the sound file, and increase MooVer's application memory size to the size of the sound file, plus 500K. So if you are reading a sound file that is 1,500K, set MooVer to 2,000K.
4. If the time duration of a sound in a movie is longer than the time duration of all the image frames displayed, then when the images finish playing, the movie area will be erased to a blank white screen while the sound finishes playing. This is often considered to be an unwanted side-effect. For now, you simply have to make sure the sound finishes at the same time or sooner than the images. This often requires a little math to multiply the total number of images by the frames-per-second to get the total time duration of the video, and compare that to the time duration of the sound track.
5. Related to 3 above, do you want to make a slide show with very slowly changing images? It is simple, but not too obvious. You need to make the images change slower than once per second... In the Compression Settings dialog, you are allowed to enter a fractional value into the frames-per-second field! So if you wanted your images to change every 4 seconds, you would enter 0.25 (which is 1/4) into the frames-per-second field.
6. If you select a group of Pict files from one folder and drag them onto MooVer, they may not be added in the order you expect. Note that they will be added in the order they are sorted in the Finder directory. If your directory is being viewed "by date", then the files will be added from oldest to newest. If the directory is viewed "by name", then they will be added alphabetically by file name. If you want the files to be added in some other order, you can of course drop each file onto MooVer one at a time in the order you wish, thus forcing a particular order.
7. If a sound file is dropped onto MooVer, only the Save Movie file dialog is presented, no Settings dialog (since the Settings dialog is only used for images.) If both sounds and Pict images are dropped onto MooVer, both the Save Movie file dialog and the Settings dialog will be displayed... however, which dialog shows up first depends on which kind of file is the first one read by MooVer. If a sound file is first, then the Save Movie file dialog will be first. If a Pict is first, then the Settings dialog will be first. This can be a little confusing at first, but be assured that whatever order they come in, there is some reasoning behind the ordering, and MooVer creates movies either way.
8. It has been reported that movies played in some Mac QuickTime players, or flattened and moved to MSDOS and played in QuickTime for Windows will play at strange frame rates, or show "unknown" frame rates. We have not been able to verify this, but have hopefully made it less likely. This may only happen at high frame rates (16 fps or higher.)
9. Some testers have also found that some movies at higher frame rates don't play properly in MoviePlayer 1.1d1 and QuickTime 2.0, but play just fine after Apple's Multimedia Tuner extension (QuickTime bugfix) is installed. They do play correctly with QuickTime 2.1, since the Multimedia Tuner's fixes are in QT 2.1. This Multimedia Tuner extension is available from most on-line services and the internet, or better yet, just get QuickTime 2.1. Thank you Mark de Jong, main beta MooVer and Shaker for uncovering this one!
-MooVer is now "fat", and will run on 68K Macs, and native on Power Macintosh.
-More intelligent memory handling, uses Temporary memory for large files.
-Now accepts MACE compressed sound files (3-1 and 6-1 formats.)
-User can now choose the font, and size of subtitles.
-User can choose to which movie player application the movie belongs.
-About box splash image and example animation files redone.
-Allowance for multi-user and site licenses.
Bugs Fixed
-There was a bug when the font height was calculated for subtitles, it was too small, resulting in subtitles sticking up over the top of the gray area. Now the font height is correctly calculated prior to calculating the overall window size.
-There was a bug calculating the beginning of a sound, which caused an initial click in the final sound track.
-Fixed a bug where 44K/sec sounds were not created properly, now 5K/sec, 7K, 11K, 22K, and 44K sounds all work correctly.
-Removed initial splash screen when MooVer was run with no files (impeded AppleScripting.)
-Sometimes an output movie file name would use the input image file name without deleting the .Pict prefix (e.g., "MooVerDemo.Pict Movie", instead of "MooVerDemo Movie".)
-Cancelling from the Movie Save file dialog didn't cancel cleanly, giving error messages.
-Better error handling, all errors should be detected and displayed now... no more unexplained empty movies.
Looking towards MooVer version 2.0, these may be added from the growing wish-list:
-Allow multiple System 7 sound files to be dropped along the sequence, and add them as part of the sound track, starting at the frame they were dropped.
-Allow user entered text to be added into movie as copyright string.
-Add custom icon to final movie file, and let user choose preview frame.
-FLI/FLC style (MSDOS) movies may be dropped on and converted to QuickTime movies.
-AppleScript: Need a "close" event, allow specifying output file spec, and of course, full scripting of the settings
-Save the subtitle track as true text track, not burnt text.
-Allow even more user options for the final generation of movies, like optional flattening for cross-platform movies.
-UnMooVer mode, importing a QuickTime movie and spitting out individual Pict and sound Files.
-If these features are added, MooVer's shareware fee will also increase to $15, so register now while the price is low!
Of course, the most important options are the ones you decide need to be added. Please let me know how you are using MooVer, and what you would most like to see added!
This software program and its files and documents (referred to as "the software") are Copyrighted Shareware. The software may be used by any individual user to create movies. The resulting movies are the sole property of the user, and can be used for any purpose, personal or commercial. The software may be distributed freely as a complete package with its documentation and files on BBSes. The software may not be sold for profit by another company or individual, nor may it be distributed by Shareware companies or bundled with commercial software, without prior permission from the author. Companies are invited to contact esp Software for permission to distribute the software, as most requests are granted. Registering the software with esp Software entitles the user to use this program on one computer at a time. The user may install registered versions of MooVer on multiple computers if the user is the only one using the software, and only one copy of the software is used at a time. Discounts for multi-user licenses or site licenses are now available upon request. The author does not guarantee the fitness of the software for any purpose. The author cannot be held liable for the software's use or misuse.
If you use this software often and you feel it is worthwhile, please pay for it by sending the Shareware fee to esp Software. Please read and print the accompanying document called "Registration Form" for details on registering this software product. If you do not return the information on the registration form, the registration cannot be processed. If you prefer, you may instead fill out the information and send it via e-mail to esp Software, at the e-mail address listed below. This registration is a one-time fee, and licenses the use of the software to you for all future releases of the Shareware version of MooVer, even if the Shareware price increases. After you register, esp Software will postal mail you a personal registration number on a printed certificate. When you enter this number with your name, the "Please Register" dialog will no longer appear when you launch the application. Registering entitles you to notices of updates to this application, and also possible notices of any other new applications created by esp Software.
Please help support the Shareware concept and Macintosh software development, register your copy of MooVer today. Thank you!
