These files are designed to complement my "Option Click" column on QuickTime layering techniques. —David Battino
The following QuickTime movie has four tracks: a video track, two audio tracks, and a text track. I made the video track by importing 16 JPEG images from EM’s “What’s New” column.
To make an image sequence, you simply
I chose two frames per second, which makes each image last one beat at 120 bpm in 4/4 time. Next, I opened a 120 bpm WAV file in another QuickTime Player. (The WAV file is a groove I recorded while reviewing the Korg MicroX.) I pressed Copy, switched to the still-image movie, selected everything, and pasted the audio to a new track using QuickTime Pro’s Add to Selection & Scale command. This command stretches the pasted file to match the duration you’ve selected in the destination movie.
For the second WAV file, a rhythmic laugh, I again opened the sound in a new QuickTime player and copied it. Then I moved the cursor in the destination file to the point where I wanted the laugh to start, and selected the Add to Movie command. That creates a new track that’s not time-stretched.
The text track shows up in orange above the photos, like supertitles. It came from this simple text file:
{QTtext} {font:Arial} {bold} {anti-alias:on} {size:14} {textColor: 65535, 32000, 0} {justify:center} {width:220} {height:20}
Electronic Musician
Tells You...
What's New
Every Month.
The first line with formatting commands is optional; what’s important is that each subsequent line ends with a return. That makes QuickTime display each line sequentially. Because I opened the text file in a new QuickTime Player, copied everything, and added it scaled to the main movie, the four lines of text spanned eight seconds and changed every bar (two seconds).
With all the tracks, the sync was a bit sloppy, so I rendered the layered movie to a new one with just one video track (containing the text as a graphic) and one audio track: