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Interactive QuickTime Authoring, Part 3
Is LiveStage Professional Totally Hip?
First off, let me apologize for what I now consider to be the lame subtitle I thought up for this installment of our interactive QuickTime authoring series. Please, pick whichever excuse you find most appropriate:
- I was tired.
- I was drunk.
- I needed the money.
Now that everything's all better between us, we're going to turn our attention this time to a program that doesn't just enlist QuickTime as part of a larger interactive authoring solution, it makes QuickTime itself the entire interactive authoring solution, exporting fully interactive .mov files, ready for playback in the QuickTime player on Macs or Windows. The guilty party? Totally Hip's LiveStage Professional 4.
What It Does
Ever heard of QuickTime's tween track, color track, or sprite track? If you've only seen used QuickTime as a video format, you probably haven't. Here's where LiveStage Professional 4 (hereafter known as LSP, because I'm a fundamentally lazy creature) can help. In a nutshell, LSP gives you the ability to weave together all of those varied QuickTime tracks Apple has so craftily hidden in the QuickTime architecture into really cool, fully interactive QuickTime movies. Of course, it's better to show you than to tell you (fig. 1), so you can check out some of the things LSP can do here (click on the poster thumbnail about three-quarters of the way down the page) or here (click on the "Enhanced Films" section, but beware the large download size). Naturally, you'll need the QuickTime Player to view these. Now, a disclaimer: I have no idea if the BMWfilms.com pieces are actually done in LSP, but hell, they sure are a cool use of QuickTime; regardless, I can safely proclaim that LSP has everything you need to actually produce projects like that.
Figure 1: A screenshot from the enhanced BMW Films player, done entirely with QuickTime.
How It Uses QuickTime
Yeah, I know. I kept the "What It Does" section noticeably, almost painfully, brief. That's because LSP and QuickTime are so intertwined that it makes more sense to pack all the stuff it does into the "How It Uses QuickTime" section. So here goes.
It's probably important to note right off the bat that LSP, unlike some other multimedia authoring programs, doesn't provide any tools for asset creation. For example, in Flash, you can draw images directly in the program with the paint and vector tools, but with LSP, it's an integration-only environment. That means you have to create your images, movies, and other assets in outside programs before you fire up LSP to create your interactive movies. Think of it as building a house. You need to have all the materials on the job site before you can build the house, and those materials have to be manufactured elsewhere before you can start putting the pieces together. In the real world, that means you need to have all your movies edited, images produced, Flash flashed, and everything else you plan to use ready to go in a format that QuickTime understands before LSP can begin to do its magic.
Once you launch LSP, you'll see a pretty standard stage/timeline interface that users of various NLEs or interactive authoring programs will probably find familiar. There is also a global and local Library panel where you choose project assets, as well as an inspector panel that gives you quick access to project-wide and individual asset settings (fig. 2). It's a deceptively simple way of accessing all the power underneath QuickTime's hood, which for my money means that Totally Hip has done a tremendous job of streamlining the potential rampant confusion when managing QuickTime's track-based architecture into a coherent and easy-to-use interface.
Figure 2: The LSP interface.
<rant>
Now, I don't mean to put you off by mentioning the potential for rampant confusion, but the fact of the matter is that the way QuickTime is designed to handle and present interactive content is confusing at best. The blame for this is Apple's, not Totally Hip's. Everything you see in a QuickTime movie, interactive or not, represents an instance of a specialized track. Even if you've only seen QuickTime in action showing you a movie trailer on the internet, you're seeing an example of QuickTime presenting a video track and a sound track in a simple two-track application (fig. 3). Sure, that's fairly straightforward when you're talking about movie clips, but when you get into the realm of interactive movies, QuickTime's reliance on tracks can present an awkward way of doing things. I mean, you have text tracks, sprite tracks, tween tracks, modifier tracks, color tracks, image tracks, video tracks, movie tracks, and various other types of tracks, some (but not all) of which give you options to add sub-tracks (AKA samples), some (but not all) of which you can "wire up" with interactivity, each with different rules, etceteree, etceteraa. And Apple's lack of appropriate QuickTime developer tools, authoring resources, and even a coherent marketing direction on QuickTime as a viable cross-platform interactive format are probably the primary reasons that QuickTime is most widely known as a video-only technology. Fortunately, companies like Totally Hip have recovered Apple's fumble and come out with software such as LSP to make heavy-duty interactive QuickTime much more feasible (not to mention enjoyable) to develop.
</rant>
Figure 3: Even the most basic of QuickTime movies is a multitrack application.
With that off my chest, I hope I have provided some perspective as to what an monumental feat Totally Hip has pulled off by slapping a relatively simple interface on top the complex underpinnings of interactive QuickTime. Through the library panel, adding tracks is as simple as dragging and dropping assets into the timeline or directly onto the stage, at which point LSP automatically creates the appropriate type of track for you (fig. 4). Of course, you can use this technique to quickly author simple projects like slideshows or a series of movies that play in a row, but frankly, you can do simple stuff like that with Apple's QuickTime Pro player itself, so to get the most out of LSP it really pays to know your tracks. Lucky for us, LSP's documentation is very thorough in explaining what types of tracks are available, what each does, and examples of when to use a particular track or not. The documentation is also chock-stinking-full with tips and hints on how to avoid QuickTime's shortcomings (the lack of font embedding leaps immediately to mind) (fig. 5).
Figure 4: Each of these track types were automatically created by dragging an asset from LSP's Library panel onto the Stage.
Figure 5: Handy hints like this are peppered all throughout LSP's documentation.
OK, so with all this talk about the different track types, it might make sense to run through what some of the less obvious ones are and what you can use them for:
Video Tracks. Well, maybe the video track doesn't exactly fall into the "less obvious" track category, but it's worth a mention that LSP is a full QuickTime 6 production environment, meaning you're now free to use MPEG-4 videos in your projects (fig. 6), along with all the other video codecs QuickTime supports.
Figure 6: With LSP 4, MPEG-4 files are now welcomed into the QuickTime fold.
Movie Tracks. Movie tracks, video tracks, what's the stinkin' difference? At least that's what I thought at first. Turns out, there's a big difference. Movie tracks are externally-linked, full .mov files, meaning that you can nest a bunch of fully interactive QuickTime movies within a host .mov file, opening up interesting possibilities for interactive content a la Flash's Movie Clip model.
Sprite Tracks. Sprite tracks are the BIG ones as far as QuickTime interactivity is concerned, at least if you don't have access to Flash (more on that later). While sprite tracks are pretty unwieldy when it comes time to animate them (you have to apply a wholly separate tween or modifier track to animate sprite tracks, which isn't even worth going into here), sprite tracks are the most "wire-able" of the native QuickTime tracks as far as scripting is concerned. You can either place a few images (or samples) in a sprite track and add scripting to them to make buttons (fig. 7), leave a sprite track blank and have it be a script-only track, or do any one of a bunch of other things a sprite track can accomplish.
Figure 7: The sprite track panel, where you create sprites and wire them for interactivity.
Flash Tracks. If you're also a Flash user, I would recommend that you completely avoid using the sprite track and all of its vagaries and arbitrary rules in favor of Flash tracks. Again, since LSP supports QuickTime 6, you get the ability to use Flash 5 media in your QuickTime movies instead of the old Flash 4 support in QuickTime 5. Flash 5, by the way, is pee-lenty good enough to do some really great things in QuickTime. In addition to being able to use vector animations natively, the Flash track is really superbly integrated into LSP, letting you add QScript calls to ActionScripts that you've already placed in your Flash movie (fig. 8). For my money, interactive QuickTime movies that make liberal use of Flash capabilities via the Flash track represent potentially the most dynamic solution around for interactive authoring available today, period. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), I'm a huge fan of hybrid Flash/QuickTime movies.
Figure 8: LSP lets you add QScript (in blue) to your Flash buttons, which will run side-by-side with any ActionScript (in gray) present in the SWF file.
FastTracks. FastTracks refer to a set of "tracks" that Totally Hip has included in LSP to ease the creation of some of the more vexing tasks associated with producing interactive QuickTime, like custom media skins and progress bars, as simple as dragging and dropping (fig. 9). I enclose the word tracks in quotes here because FastTracks are not native QuickTime tracks; rather, they are a neat little moniker for a set of specialized functions proprietary to LSP. Once you compile your finished .mov file, though, FastTracks are converted into their respective native QuickTime features.
Figure 9: The Skin FastTrack makes the normally cumbersome process of custom media player skins in QuickTime very simple. Other FastTracks include player controls, progress loaders, and QuickTime VR controls.
QScript. Well, QScript isn't a kind of track per se, but QScript is the internal LSP scripting language that you attach to various track types (mostly sprite tracks) to get them to do interactive things. If you've ever worked with a JavaScript-style scripting language, QScript is pretty easy to pick up. Of course, QScript is full of custom calls and such that are pertinent to QuickTime, but thanks to the convenient QScript dictionary integrated into LSP, it's pretty easy to figure out what's what (fig. 10).
Figure 10: The QScript Reference panel in action. In addition to providing sample syntax, you can drag and drop reference items directly into a LSP project's script window.
So Now What?
Again, I have shamed not only myself, but my family and all of my descendants until the end of time by barely scratching the surface of what LSP is capable of. I only mentioned a scant few of the types of QuickTime tracks LSP gives you access to, I barely glossed over QScript, and totally dissed excellent features like XML integration and the various publishing and exporting options LSP provides altogether. Fortunately, you can pick up where my shoddy work left off by downloading the demo of LSP that Totally Hip is kind enough to provide from their web site. LiveStage Professional 4 is available now for Mac OS X and 9, with the Windows version "planned for release shortly." LSP runs $899.95 for the full version, with upgrades costing $499.95 from version 2 and $299.95 from version 3.
LSP is the type of program that makes QuickTime a very serious (albeit still largely overlooked) player in the interactive authoring space, making the rather kludgey process of authoring interactive QuickTime intuitive and -- dare I say -- fun. And though you'd probably never know it from what Apple tells you, QuickTime is quite capable of producing dynamic, cross-platform multimedia for either online or offline delivery, and LSP is simply the easiest and most powerful way of getting in on the action.
NEXT TIME - Part 4: There's QuickTime Authoring Built Into What?
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