How to Create Quicktime Cue Points

Date: Thu Apr 13 09:29:27 MST 2000
From: Brennan Young <brennan@young.net>
Subject: How to Create Quicktime Cue Points

You will need the Pro version of Quicktime to do this. If you are developing multimedia and you do not have Quicktime Pro, stop messing around and buy a license. It is a serious piece of kit. Apple just forgot to tell you how to use it.

Essentially, you just import any text file (which in the beginning can be blank or just with some dummy text) into Quicktime Player.

Either drag the text file onto the QT Player icon, or choose 'import' from the file menu.

This will generate a text track movie.

Incidentally:

Every carriage return will delimit a text 'sample'. One sample is visible at a time, and by default, each sample lasts one second.Read on and I'll tell you how to edit the timing and text of the chapters.

Chapter tracks assume one text sample per chapter. Keep your chapter names fairly brief.

OK back to the process...

1. Select All, copy the track to the clipboard.
2. Open the movie you want to add cuepoints to. Select All
3. Hold down Shift and Alt. Look in the 'Edit' menu.
4. 'Paste' will have changed to 'Add Scaled' Select it. On Windows, I think the modifier keys are slightly different. Try different combinations until you get to see 'Add Scaled'.

This will 'paste' the text track into your movie and 'stretch' it so that its duration matches the selection in the movie you are pasting into (if you select only a small part of the timeline, the clipboard will be pasted to match the duration of the selection.)

HEY THERE!
The 'Add Scaled' functionality is my number 1 Quicktime tip which turns QT Player from a player app into a really powerful 'media bricolage' tool. It works with all other supported media types too such as Flash, wired sprites, MIDI or whatever. Start playing around with 'Add Scaled' and you can make some amazing things.

OK back to the process...

Anyway, you now have a text track added to your movie which has exactly the same length. Don't worry about the fact that it is visible, or that the text is all wrong, or the timing is out. I'm now about to tell you how to edit the text track in place;

1. Choose Movie->'Get Info' for the text track and choose 'Text Replace'
2. Make selections in the timeline where you want the cues to be synchronised and drag text from a text editor (such as SimpleText or WordPad) into the 'Drop text here' field. You can be as accurate or as loose as you need to be. It's possible to tighten up a loose edit later (see below).
3. When you're finished, choose 'Set as Chapter Track' from the Get Info... popup and choose one of your other tracks (such as video or sound)
4. The text track will now become a chapter track, which is seen by Director as cue points.

When you convert it to a chapter track it should disappear from the main content window. (It doesn't always do this automatically. If not, you can disable it using Edit->'enable tracks').

That's about it!

If you want more accuracy, you can export the text track from Quicktime Player.

1. Choose File...Export
2. Choose 'Text as Text'
3. Click on 'Options'
4. Check the 'with time descriptors' box.

   Think about whether you want the samples to be relative to the start of the movie, or to each other. I find relative to sample to be better in many cases.

5. Choose a suitable timescale. The default is 600. This is how the 'second' will be divided up. You might want to choose the same timescale as the framerate of your movie, for example if your movie is 12 fps, then enter 12.
6. Export the text track and open it in a text editor such as PFE, Word Pad, BBEdit, Tex Edit Plus etc.

The text descriptors looks a bit like HTML code or RTF tags, edit it manually, or (if you're smart) with any decent scripting language (PERL, Lingo, TCL, Applescript etc.)

The descriptors are described in detail (and with a few minor innacuracies) at

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/authoring/textdescriptors.html

You only need to look at this if you want to change fonts and style, or add hyper-references which is irrelevant for chapter tracks.

When you're done, reimport the file and Quicktime Player will convert the track just dandy. Don't forget to set the text track to a chapter track as described above.

Finally, here's a quick handler (D6.5 compatible) to work with QT chapter tracks...

on goToChapter whichSprite, whichCueName
  set mem = the member of sprite whichSprite

  -- is it a quicktime sprite?
  if the type of mem <> #quicktimeMedia then return 
  
  set Cues = the cuepointtimes of member mem
  set cueNames = the cuepointnames of member mem
  set whichCue = getPos(cueNames, whichCueName)
  if not whichCue then return -- cuepoint not found
  
  set cuePoint = getat(Cues, whichCue)
  set cuePointMovieTime = integer(cuePoint*0.06)
  set the movieTime of sprite whichsprite = cuePointMovieTime
end