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How It Works
QuickTime is a robust media platform that is capable of playing and integrating a huge number of formats, along with its own built-in formats QuickTime Video and QuickTime VR. Thanks to cooperation between Macromedia and Apple Computer, the QuickTime Player has a version of Flash Player built right into it, which makes it possible to overlay Flash artwork and animation right on top of QuickTime video—as well as control playback using ActionScript. (See Figure 16.)
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Figure 16 Flash-based controls and subtitles have been built into the QuickTime movie.
Because of this cooperation, Flash can be used as a basic QuickTime authoring application for adding Flash tracks to other QuickTime media. In this case, only a few simple Flash buttons were added, but the level of integration is not limited to just that. In fact, a Web-based video presentation like this could use Flash animation for all its titles and credits to improve readability.
The Flash elements and ActionScript code are combined with the video for playback in QuickTime Player. In this project, movie clips are used to allow for the display of subtitle text. However, a similar technique could be applied to display information about the actors featured in a scene, including links to Web pages or character biographies.
When a QuickTime video is imported into Flash, it is essentially for reference only. Flash isn't capable of actually editing the video file, so regardless of the frame rate that you set for the Flash movie, the duration of the video representation will be stretched or shrunk to compensate because its frame rate is already fixed. The video will determine the frame rate in QuickTime Player, so it makes sense to set the frame rate of the Flash track to match so that precise synchronization is a no-brainer. The synchronization makes it possible to predict that jumping to a certain frame on the Flash track will jump to the same frame on the video track, like the Rewind button does in this tutorial.