QuickTime is Apple's new system extension which supports playback of full motion video and simultaneous sound on the Macintosh. This document provides a little more information than the installation instructions provided by Apple There have been several magazine articles on QuickTime, and there will be many more after the formal release. The purpose of this article is to provide how-to-install-and-use it guidance. We will not spend a great deal of time on what it is or what it may become. You can read the Magazine articles for that. A picture is (they say) worth a thousand words. Then a moving picture must be worth many thousands. So, just do it, and you will see what it does.
QuickTime requires a Mac with a 68020 or higher CPU, which means the Plus, SE, and Classic are not able to use QuickTime. Also required are 2 Megabytes or more of RAM. I have seen references that indicate a color Mac is required, although the installation instructions provided by Apple do not say so. I did try it on an SE30. It does work, althogh if the movie being run is in color (as they practically all are), then the resolution will not be very good at all. Further, the movie I tried ran very slowly. You also must be using System 6.0.7 or higher. The use of Wild Magic requires System 7.0 or higher (but does it really?; See below). From a practical standpoint, you may well need a lot of hard disk storage space. At least you will if you plan to view a lot of movies, or movies that are at all complex. Although you will find some movies of 500K or so, most are rather large. For example, a movie with sound that lasts over a minute can be over 5 Megabytes in size. Still, even if you have limited disk space you will be able to try out QuickTime with some of the shorter movies. With that out of he way, let's crank her up and see how she runs.
If you are running System 7, just drag the QuickTime Extension and the Wild Magic Cdev onto (that's onto, not into) the System Folder, and let the System place them where they belong. If you want to do it manually, put QuickTime in the Extensions Folder and Wild Magic in the Control Panels Folder. Note: A read me file (not provided) gives a dire warning against trying to access Wild Magic via the Control Panel before restarting the Mac. If you are using System 6.0.7 or 6.0.8, just place QuickTime loose in the System Folder. Note: If you are using the screen saver "After Dark," then you will need to use an Extensions manager to force After Dark to load after QuickTime. Otherwise a conflict will cause After Dark to work improperly. If you don't have an Extensions manager then rename After Dark to "yAfter Dark." Since Extensions are loaded alphabetically, this will force "yAfter Dark" to load after QuickTime.
Rename your current Scrapbook file located in your System Folder to something else (for example: "old.Scrapbook File"). Then drag the new Scrapbook onto the System Folder. It will be placed in the Apple Menu Items folder. It will automatically create a new Scrapbook File when the Desk Accessory is accessed. If you are running System 6.0.7 or 6.0.8 then you will need to install the System 6 Scrapbook Desk Accessory into your System File using the Font/DA Mover.
That's all the special installation necessary. In later versions of System 7 QuickTime is expected to be built-into the System itself, avoiding all or most of this installation process. You will need to restart the Mac for QuickTime to be ready to go. The other files provided on the initial disks can placed anywhere on your hard disk drive. Actually you can play them from the floppy, but due to slow disk access speed of floppies, you will not be happy with the results.
The "Simple Player" file is an application that will (can you guess?) play movies. There are two movies in this three disk set: "AMUG Movie," and Vintage Car. To see what QuickTime is all about, just double-click either of them. The Simple Player application will start, and load the movie you double-clicked and it will be ready to play. When the Movie comes up, you will see a control bar at the bottom of its window. The icon at the left represents a speaker. If the movie has no sound track it will be greyed-out. Otherwise you can click-press the icon, then drag up or down to set the volume of the sound track. The arrow just to the right will start the movie, and pause it if pressed after the movie has started. Just to the right again is a slidebar. Click-pressing and sliding the frame indicator in the slidebar will do a continuous frame forward - frame backward movement. The left-pointing and right-pointing arrows to the right of the slidebar will move one frame at a time in the direction of the arrow pressed. You can experiment with the other features of the Simple Player application.
Now on to Wild Magic. Wild Magic is indeed well named, and its use will give an idea of the great potential for QuickTime. With Wild Magic Installed, open any movie with the player. Then choose "Select All" from the Edit menu. That will select the entire movie. Alternately, you can hold down the shift key, and drag the frame indicator back and forth to select part of the movie. If you just copy, without selecting anything, you will may end up pasting only the opening frame. After you make a selection, then do a Copy. You can then do a paste into any document that will accept a PICT format paste. For example you can paste the movie into the Scrapbook File (assuming you have installed the new Scrapbook Desk Accessory), or into a MicroSoft Word document (or an Excel 3.0 document if you like). To play the movie from say MicroSoft Word you have to press whatever keys you set up by accessing Wild Magic from the control panel. The default is the Command Key. Then click on the movie filmstrip icon. Something that confused me a bit at first is that you are not cutting and pasting the entire movie when you do a paste as suggested above, put only a pointer to where the movie file is located (kinda like an alias under System 7). So the movie file itself has to be on line and where it was when you copied it. If the movie itself is not on line, you will get a dialog box asking you (by its name) to mount the disk volume from which you copied the movie. After the movie is loaded if you then press the option and the command keys and click on the filmstrip, you will get a dialog box telling you where the movie is located.
Earlier I stated that Wild Magic required System 7 to work, since that's what some documentation I read said. However, I've done some experimenting, and it works, kind of. Using System 6.0.8 I was able to install Wild Magic and cut and paste movies as described above into both the Scrapbook File and a MicroSoft Word 4.0 document (presumably System 6.0.7 should be OK too, but I didn't try it). However, if you try to access Wild Magic via the Control Panel, it will tell you that it wasn't installed. But, you know better now that I've told you so. However, you will not be able to change the default commands. This is OK, provided you know what they are. If you received Wild Magic from the Best of disks, then the defaults are as described above, that is: Command to start a movie and the Command-Option to get information on where the movie is stored. However, it appears that just clicking a movie installed in a Word document will start it without the Command key being held down under System 6.0.x. Well perhaps these anomalies are what decided the publishers of Wild Magic to say it required System 7 to work.
Speaking of anomalies, note that this is the first release of QuickTime. Presumably it will be the same as that released formally by Apple, but that is not necessarily so. As noted earlier, QuickTime is expected to be built-into the next upgrade of System 7 (Presumably System 7.1). In the interim, you can expect updates as we move along. In the future all Macs, including the 68000 ones now excluded, will supposedly be able to use QuickTime. In the meantime, have fun with it as ye may.
