A QuickTime reference movie is a QuickTime movie that contains composition information but no movie data. Instead, the movie contains pointers to the original media in the OMFI MediaFiles directory on local or network media drives. Because the QuickTime reference movie does not contain media, the file is much smaller than a QuickTime movie, usually only a few kilobytes per file. Therefore, exporting a sequence as a QuickTime reference movie is faster and takes up less disk space than exporting a sequence as a QuickTime movie. When you play back the movie in QuickTime Player, the movie references the media files for playback.
QuickTime reference movies are useful as long as you are working with Avid OMFI media files available on your local system. Advantages are speed and small file size because the system does not copy the source media files into the exported QuickTime file. However, if you expect to move the exported QuickTime file to a system that doesn't have access to the media, then you should use the standard QuickTime export so that the media files and QuickTime wrapper can be moved as one file. See
Exporting as a QuickTime Movie.
