A simple Movie will contain a Video track and a sound track. These two tracks are played synchronously by QuickTime to create the Movie. The video track is fed through a video decompressor and then the resultant image is displayed on the screen. The sound track is fed through the sound chip in the computer and played out either your computer's speaker or the output audio jacks.
A more complex movie may contain many video and sound tracks, caused by editing movies. QuickTime will play these many different tracks at the appropriate time to make the movie play smoothly. Because there can be a great deal of overhead in ending one track and starting another track, the overhead to do this may have an impact on the Movie (it depends on how far apart the edits are).
Edits -
Edits also cause the data in a Movie to be out of order for normal playing. QuickTime will jump around in the Movie to get the appropriate data whenever the current time in the Movie is. If jumping around in a file is done then there is a "seeking" time penalty that you will pay. If the Movie has a very low data rate and/or the "seeking" time is very short (like on a Hard drive), then it will not affect playing of the Movie. However, if the data rate of the movie is very high and/or the "seeking" time is very long (as on a CD-ROM drive), then it will seriously impact playing the movie.
Movie information
These controls allow you access to displays that show more details about the movie.
?
This "Info" button will display a large window with detailed technical information about the movie.
Pressing the "Info" button is the same as selecting the "General Info" menu selection in the "Info" menu.
?
This is a display of the detailed information about a movie.
?
Information about video tracks looks like that below:
?
The window below shows the detailed information about a sound track.
?
Tracks in Movie
To see the relationship of multiple tracks, in Movie time space, to each other use this selection:
?
?
Data in the file.
?
This display shows how the data is laid out in the file. The different colors represent the different tracks of data, both Video and Sound. The display is shown on a "K" basis, one pixel wide is 1024bytes of data.
?
Edits in a movie.
The edits in a movie, as compared to where the data for each edit is in the media, can be displayed in this window.
?
?
Playability display
This display shows how the data in a file resides as well as how the data in the movie itself resides.
?
?
The top graph shows the data in the file, in order of file offset.
The other graph shows how the data resides in movie time.