QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 3. Editing Movies

Playback is nice, but you have nothing to play if you lack tools to create media, and the most critical of these are editing tools. If you’ve ever used iMovie with your home movies, you know what I’m talking about: there’s a huge difference between watching a cute collection of scenes of your kids playing, set to music, and watching the two hours of unedited raw footage you started with. Sometimes, less is more.

Copying and Pasting

The most familiar form of editing is copy-and-paste, which many users already are familiar with from the “pro” version of QuickTime Player. The metaphor is identical to how copy-and-paste works in nonmedia applications such as text editors and spreadsheets: select some source material of interest, do a “copy” to put it on the system clipboard, select an insertion point in this or another document, and do a “paste” to put the contents of the clipboard into that target.

In the simplest form of a QuickTime copy-and-paste, the controller bar (from MovieController) is used to indicate where copies and pastes should occur. By shift-clicking, a user can select a time-range from the current time (indicated by the play head) to wherever the user shift-clicks (or, if he is dragging, wherever the mouse is released).

Note

QuickTime Pro costs money ($29.99 as of this writing), but it allows you to exercise much of the QuickTime API from QuickTime Player, which can be a useful debugging tool.

How do I do that?

BasicQTEditor, shown in Example ...