Specifications

Chapter 36: Working with QuickTime Movies 577
Video Compatibility If you are not digitizing the
video material yourself (if the material is already
on hard disk) check into the type of video cap-
ture and playback system that was used and
make sure you can accommodate that format’s
compression method. Check whether or not
time code is “burned into” or superimposed
over a small area of the video.
QuickTime Requirements
Pro Tools supports playback of QuickTime vid-
eos without additional hardware. However,
with older Macintosh computers that had video
inputs, performance will vary in terms of maxi-
mum movie size, frame rate, and smoothness of
playback. Capture of 30/25 fps (frames per sec-
ond), 60/50 fields-per-second video requires a
video capture card, and associated software and
hardware.
About Frame Length and QuickTime
Movies
Not all video capture software can guarantee
consistent frame lengths. Refer to your video
capture software documentation for informa-
tion on ensuring frame-accurate captures, and
on conforming your video to proper frame
boundaries.
To take advantage of Pro Tools QuickTime
movie playback capabilities, you will need the
following:
◆ A Digidesign-qualified version of Apple’s
QuickTime System Extension. Refer to the
Digidesign Web site (www.digidesign.com/com-
pato).
◆ QuickTime movie playback and editing soft-
ware (such as Avid XPress DV) to edit and com-
pile QuickTime movies.
Optionally, you may also need:
◆ QuickTime movie capture hardware and soft-
ware to digitize your own movies from a video
tape or video camera source.
◆ A DVD or CD-ROM drive to take advantage of
commercially-available QuickTime movies and
sound clips.
Movie Playback Quality
Options
Pro Tools supports three options for movie play-
back performance: Normal Priority Playback,
Medium Priority Playback, and Highest Priority
Playback. In most cases, you should leave the
priority choice set to Normal Priority Playback.
If you are running QuickTime Movies natively,
that is, without a capture card, you may need to
use one of the other playback priority options. If
this does not apply to you, leave movie playback
priority set to Normal Priority Playback. This is
the default setting.
Hard Drive Tips for Best Performance
If possible, connect the hard drive you are using
for video capture and playback on a different
SCSI, ATA/IDE, or FireWire bus from the drive
with your audio files. This minimizes interfer-
ence between drives when Pro Tools requests
audio and video data. With most capture cards,
and moderate data capture rates (800 kilobytes
per second or less), this should provide good
performance.
For complete information on hard drive require-
ments, visit the Digidesign Web site.
See also “Firewire Playback of QuickTime
DV Movies” on page 579.