Creating Text Tracks in QuickTime

Text tracks are one of the most under-utilized features in QuickTime. You can use them to set chapter points in a long movie, a useful technique for organizing a distance learning course or segments of a news cast. Here's a quick step-by-step guide to creating a chaptered movie.

Create a Basic Text Track Movie

1. Using SimpleText on the Mac, or Wordpad on Windows, create a list of text descriptions for the chapter stops in your movie. Items need to be separated by a carriage return.

2. Import that text file into your QT Pro player application using the File menu command. QT will bring up an Open dialog box where you'll hit the Convert button. It will then be replaced by a "Save converted file as:" dialog box.

3. When entering a file name in the Convert dialog, hit OK, and QT creates the Text Movie from your text file, with each line of text in a separate, two-second movie segment.

4. Using the Export command under the File pull-down, create a text descriptor file for your text track. Select the Text to Text options in the Export pull down at the bottom of the Export dialog. Then, in the Use pull down, select the Text with Descriptors option that is now active.

5. Click OK, choose a name for your text descriptor file and save this new text file for editing.

Setting Chapter Points in your Movie

A Chapter track is a specialized text track, which displays the Chapter titles next to the scroll bar in the player, such as the example in Figure 1. They allow random access in a movie, but keep in mind that this interactivity is only available using true streaming on a QT server when delivering over a network.

Figure 1: Chapter Title Display

1. To create the Chapter track, start with a basic text track. After exporting the text descriptor file, open it up in your word processing application. Then, open the movie file you wish to add chapters to and its information window in MoviePlayer, using the Get Info command in the Movie pull down menu. Your display should look like Figure 2.

Figure 2: Chapter Track Display

Tip: Click on the button with four dots in MoviePlayer to reveal the playback controls allowing you to scrub through your movie and find time codes. Move the black diamond in the MoviePlayer controller to the general point of the chapter break, then use the middle set of keys on the controller, to step through single frames for complete accuracy.

2. Once you have selected a chapter break, use the times listed in the Movie/Time information window under Current Time, to modify the time stamps in the text descriptor file. Always end the text descriptor file with a time stamp of the ending movie time, as listed in the Movie/Time Duration information block.

3. Save the text descriptor file and import it back into MoviePlayer.

4. Now you need to add the text track movie to the video movie using the Add Scaled command. Click on the text track movie, Select All and Copy using the Edit menu pull-down or the keyboard shortcuts. Then click on the video movie, making sure the cursor is at the beginning of the player controller. Add the text track to the video movie using the Add-Scaled command by holding down Shift-Ctrl-Alt on Windows or Shift-Option on a Mac, then pull down the Edit menu.

5. Change the text track to a Chapter track in the informational window as shown in Figure 3. You need to set the Chapter Owner Track, in this case the video track, although you can use any other track in the movie. Think of the possibilities if you have multiple language tracks and want to list the Chapter titles in those languages.

Figure 3: Informational Window

6. Finally, disable the text track (don't delete it), using the Enable tracks dialog under the Edit menu in Movie Player and save your new movie, without dependencies to a new file.

And that's a wrap!