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.
Full instructions follow the list of changes below.
CHANGES TO 1.2
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A new utility is included in the Theater Maker package- the "Theater" After Dark module. If you have After Dark v2.0u or later, drop this module in your After Dark Files folder. You can then pick a movie & a Theater Maker background file to have it play whenever the screen saver comes on. Great for demos or promos if you have a mac out in public.
In an attempt to help movies play smoother & faster, a new option is available when you create a Theater. If you uncheck "Allow other applications time to run", then the Theater will use ALL of the Mac's processor time to play the movie, and no other applications that are running will get any time to run in the background. This is usually a bad thing to do, but if you want every last bit of speed out of your movies, go for it. Note - if you uncheck this option, you won't be able to change the movie volume with the keyboard while the Theater is playing.
CHANGES TO 1.1
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New icons (you may have to rebuild your desktop to see them).
Playing movies in loops has a less noticeable transition from the end back to the
beginning now.
You can now drag a Movie, Frame or both onto the TheaterMaker application in the Finder, and when it launches it will fill in the appropriate fields in the setup dialog for you!
A new "Credits" checkbox has been added, that lets select whether to show the TheaterMaker credits at the end of a movie.
You can now easily create your own background frames in TheaterMaker! To do this, select "Create Frame" from the File menu. You will be asked to select a PICT file for the frame. The picture will be displayed, and you can click & drag the mouse to select the region you want your movie to play in. After you've dragged out an area, you can move it around and resize it on the screen by clicking and dragging the handles in each corner of the rectangle. You can also use the arrow keys to nudge the picture up and down, and shift-arrow & option-arrow to grow/shrink the movie area respectively. The numbers in the bottom right corner of the screen are the width & height of the movie area.
After you are done adjusting the movie rectangle, hit the RETURN key. Now you can set the compression method for the Frame. There are 3 options-
JPEG - this compresses VERY well for photographs, scanned images, or frames of video. It works best with 24-bit(millions of colors) pictures.
Graphics- this compresses well for graphics you have made on your mac in a paint or draw program, especially graphics with 256 colors or less.
Normal- this will copy the picture directly from the original file, without trying any special compression. If your original PICT file isn't very big, or the other compression methods make the picture look strange, choose Normal.
Last, just pick a file name to save the new frame as.
Note - using the Create Frame option may take more memory than TheaterMaker is normally set up for. If you get a memory error, simply Get Info on the TheaterMaker application and set its application size to 1024k or 1500k.
CHANGES TO 1.0.2
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1.0.2 correctly resets the Bundle bit on movie documents that are changed back from Theater applications. Before, the Finder would still think the QuickTime movie document you changed was still an application(sort of).
Also I added a new background frame, a real movie theater.
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. 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(or type M) to select the QuickTime movie file to convert.
•"Frame" - click(or type F) 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.
•"Display credits" - if this is checked, the credits for Theater maker are displayed when a movie is done.
CREATING YOUR OWN BACKGROUNDS
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Refer to the section "Changes to 1.1" above for a complete discussion of how to make your own background frames with the "Create Frame" menu option.
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.
