QuickTime Soundtrack Hacks

With close to a thousand forest fires fouling the air in California this week, it was time for some indoor creativity. My housebound sons and a 12-year-old friend borrowed my digicam, set it to video mode, and improvised a spy movie.

Not realizing they'd shot upwards of 25 clips, I offered to stitch the scenes together in QuickTime Pro (QTP), which I thought would be simpler and faster than iMovie. Basically, you...

1. Open the first clip,
2. Move the playback-position pointer to the end of the timeline,
3. Open the second clip,
4. Select All in the second clip (Command-A on Mac, Control-A on Windows),
5. Copy,
6. Return to the first clip, and
7. Paste.

QTP inserts the second movie where the pointer was (at the end of the movie in this case). If you don't want the entire second clip, you can first adjust the fiddly little in/out markers to select the part you want.

Tip: You'll go crazy trying to drag the markers with the mouse, so use your keyboard instead. Click once on a marker to highlight it, and then press the ← or → keys on your keyboard to move the marker one frame back or forward on the timeline. You can also scrub back and forth with the J and L keys, stopping playback with the K key. Once the playhead is where you want it, press I or O to set the In or Out point. (Thanks, Erica!)

All in Good Paste

QTP offers two additional ways beyond pasting to combine clips. You can access these commands from the Edit menu:

• Add to Movie creates a parallel media track starting at the current playback position. We used this with copied sound files to overdub Foley effects like punches and bullet ricochets. It was amazingly effective.
• Add to Selection and Scale shrinks or stretches the new track to fit the duration you've selected in the main movie.

I used the second command to create a title card. First I copied three seconds of a movie and pasted it into a new, blank movie. Then I created a 640x480 pixel GIF file (the dimensions of the master movie) in a graphics program, opened the GIF in QTP, copied it, and "Add Scaled" it to the three-second movie. Finally, I deleted the movie track, leaving an image that lasted for three seconds. (To see a list of all tracks, press Command-J on Mac or Control-J on Windows.)

The Add Scaled command got a more dramatic workout when the kids asked if we could convert one scene to slo-mo. For that, I created a dummy movie ten times the length of the copied clip, "Add Scaled" the clip to the dummy movie, and then deleted the original dummy track. Both the audio and video slowed down — very cool! I then copied the new movie and pasted it into the master movie.

I could have used QuickTime captioning to make the final credits, but I thought the captions would be more effective if they synced with the beat of the song underneath. The song was running at about 107 bpm, which I calculated would mean each text transition should happen every 4.486 seconds. Implementing that in an ASCII control file would be tedious, so I cheated and used Photo to Movie instead. It lets you drag a graphic on a timeline to line up with a hit point in an audio waveform.

It’s Showtime! But...

Edits done, I transferred the QuickTime .mov file to my Windows laptop, carried it downstairs, hauled out the projector, and dimmed the lights. Sadly, the sound dropped out partway through; Windows couldn't decode some of the oddball audio formats in the movie, which now had about 30 tracks.

So, back on the Mac, I exported the movie as an MP4 — collapsing it to one audio track and one video track — and tried again. No luck. I tried several other formats. Nope. I imported the movie into Toast and tried to make a DVD. Grr. In addition to dropouts, the audio and video also lost sync.

Finally, I fired up WireTap Studio and recorded the movie's audio as it played. Then I exported the movie again in DV Stream format (producing a single, full-resolution video track), deleted the DV audio track, and "Add Scaled" the WireTap audio to the DV video. Huzzah! I got a movie that synced up and burned to DVD.

Next time, I'll probably use iMovie, but this experiment taught me some cool QuickTime hacks I'm sure will come in handy down the road.