iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

QuickTime Player Pro

If you've spent the $30 to upgrade to the Pro version of QuickTime Player, you've unlocked a number of additional features. Some of these are playback tricks described in the previous section; others are especially useful for iMovie work. Read on.

Presenting Your Movies

After going to the trouble of editing down your footage (as described in Part 1) and exporting it as a QuickTime movie (as described in Chapter 14), what you may want to do most of all is to show the movie to other people. Even the non-Pro version of QuickTime Player can play movies, of course, but the Pro version offers a much better showcase for your work: the View → Present Movie command.

"Presenting" your movie is the best possible way to view a QuickTime movie on your screen. When you use this command (Figure 15-3), QuickTime Player blacks out the screen, automatically magnifies your monitor image (by choosing a lower resolution) so that the movie fills more of the screen, and devotes all the Mac's power to playing the movie smoothly. (To interrupt the movie, press ⌘-period.)

Figure 15-3. The Present Movie command makes the movie fill your screen (although enlargement makes the movie grainier and coarser, which is why Apple gives you a choice here).

Editing Movies

The most powerful feature you gain in the Pro version is its ability to edit QuickTime movies. You can rearrange scenes, eliminate others, ...