QuickTime movies aren’t just for playing — they’re for playing with. Movies can interact with you, with your browser, with a server and with other movies. They can act as control panels, games, puzzles, musical instruments and much more.

Since it’s track-based, QuickTime lets you work with all kind of media and languages to let you accomplish your desired end, from using Flash and QuickTime sprites to industry standards such as SMIL.

QuickTime and Flash Embedded

QuickTime supports Flash 5. Macromedia’s Shockwave Flash (.swf) file format is widely used on many web sites for animation. A .swf file can contain vector and bitmap animation, as well as interactive elements. With QuickTime and Flash you can easily create interactive movies.

Native Flash animation is in vector format; it is compact, scalable and lossless. Flash files can also include bitmaps; these are not vectorized unless a bitmap tracing function is invoked from within the Flash application. In QuickTime, the Flash track retains its native format — Flash vectors are not converted into bitmaps or QuickTime vectors. Bitmapped graphics embedded in a Flash .swf remain bitmaps after they are imported into QuickTime.

Add More Media To Movies

One reason to create a Flash track in a QuickTime movie is to include graphics in formats that are supported by Flash. For example, the Flash application can directly import vector graphics from Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand and Autodesk AutoCAD (release 10 ASCII DXF). An easy way to incorporate these graphics into QuickTime is to import them into Flash and then import the Flash .swf as a new QuickTime track.

QuickTime Sprites

QuickTime sprites let you add interactivity to your media. QuickTime Sprites are animations that can be made of an image, a short image sequence or a video clip. These images can be moved around the movie frame on a vector path — creating the animation. As the sprite creator you need to create the image (such as a logo), specify the movement path (a spin motion, for example) and add other behaviors (like play a sound). QuickTime does the rest. The first frame of the animation contains the image data; the subsequent frames contain only a reference to the image, the behavior and new x and y coordinates where the image will be displayed. All calculations are done on the viewer’s computer, making sprites a very efficient, low-bandwidth way to create movement.

Sprites in Action

The actions of a sprite can be driven by system events such as mouse actions or keystrokes. So you can use sprites to design custom movie controllers that your audience can click on. Sprites can also know their own position coordinates, layer number and index and change their behavior according to criteria you define. For example, a sprite can look to see if it reaches the edge of the frame and execute a "bounce" movement when it does. A sprite can also modify its behavior with the passage of time, either "movie" time (the duration in which the movie plays) or in real time. In fact, a sprite can continue to act even after the movie it is in is paused or stopped.

An action attached to this sprite causes it to bounce whenever it reaches the edge of the frame. Sprite actions are controlled by adding a script to a sprite; do this using LiveStage Pro by Totally Hip or Adobe GoLive.