iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. QuickTime Player

If iMovie is the program on your hard drive that’s the master of DV files, its sibling software, the corresponding master of traditional QuickTime movies, is QuickTime Player, a small, free program that comes with every Macintosh. (It’s in the Applications folder.) It does three things very well: show pictures, play movies, and play sounds (Figure 14-1).

If you’re willing to pay $30, you can upgrade your copy of QuickTime Player to the Pro version. Doing so grants you a long list of additional features, most notably the ability to edit your QuickTime movies, not just watch them.

There are two reasons QuickTime Player is worth knowing about. First, if you turn your iMovie projects into QuickTime movies (Chapter 12), QuickTime Player is the program you’ll probably be using to play them on your screen. Second, the Pro version acts as an accessory toolkit for iMovie, offering you the chance to perform several tricky editing maneuvers you couldn’t perform with iMovie alone.

This chapter covers both versions of the program, using QuickTime 7 for illustration purposes.

QuickTime Player (Free Version)

The free version of QuickTime Player is designed exclusively to play movies and sounds. You can open a movie file by double-clicking it, by dragging it onto the QuickTime Player icon, or by opening QuickTime Player and then choosing File → Open. As shown in Figure 14-1, a number of controls help you govern the movie’s playback:

• Audio level meters. This tiny graph dances ...