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REVIEW
NOVEMBER 21,
2000
Terran Interactive's Cleaner 5
[Page 2 of 6]
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Chapter
(QuickTime, Windows Media): This feature lets you mark points in your movies that
the user will see as chapters, allowing them to skip to different points in your
video without having to use fast forward or rewind. You can even give your chapters
custom names to help the user navigate.
- Display Text (QuickTime,
Real, Windows Media): This feature sticks a text field beneath your movie, which
you can then edit for start time and duration, which you might want to use for
synching text with audio (closed captioning) or to instruct the viewer to click
on a hotspot, etc. Text can be displayed at any point in the movie, and there
appears to be no limit as to how many different text messages you can embed. (Cleaner
5's documentation includes special instructions for dealing with text when encoding
for the Real format.)
- Go to Time (QuickTime):
This lets you tell a movie to go to a time specified. If you're using interactive
menus, for example, you can create hotspots over them so that the user can skip
ahead to the part of the movie that interests him or her. You can also use it
to loop the movie.
- Keyframe (QuickTime,
Real): The keyframe event lets you manually insert keyframes into your movie file
(by time, not by frame) for when users will be able to access the movie at that
particular time, such as when you're using the Go to Time event.
- Open URL (QuickTime,
Real, Windows Media): This is an outstanding feature. You can use it to sync HTML
to your movie or to allow the user to click on a hotspot to call up an HTML file
for more information. It also allows you to target a frame, so the viewer can
read along while the movie is still playing. Let's say, for example, that you
have a video that shows a man walking into a building. You can tell the movie
file to open up a graphic of the building in a frame beneath the movie and a text
history of the building in a frame next to the movieall without the end
user having to do anything. Or you can just create a hotspot to let the viewer
click on an object to find out more information about that object. Maybe the hotspot
calls up information about how the user can purchase the object he or she clicks
on. Maybe your movie is a mystery, and clicking on an object calls up information
about a clue. Whatever. It's versatile.
- Pause (QuickTime):
This will tell your movie to stop on a certain frame. This is great when you're
using interactive menus. Let's say, for example, that you're doing a newscast
that contains several stories. At the end of each story, you could pause on a
frame that contains menus, allowing users to go to a more in depth text story,
load a QuickTime VR of a product discussed in the story or just continue with
the newscast. The possibilities are endless.
- Play (QuickTime):
This only works with hotspots and lets users continue a movie following a pause,
such as in the case of pausing to display interactive menus. It can also be used
as a replacement for the default QuickTime controls.
- Replace Movie (QuickTime,
Real, Windows Media): This is a great one to use with hotspots. If you're giving
users the option of viewing a number of different video pieces, you probably don't
want to be taxing their bandwidth by having them download every single second
of footage. So you can break it up and let users choose which parts of your movie
they want to watch. The movie then loads into the same window as the original
movie. Another application might be placing advertisements in your movie. So,
for example, you can tell your video file to replace itself at a certain point
with "ad1.mov," which will then load the advertisement. The last frame
of the advertisement will then go to the next segment of your movie. The benefit
of this is that you can use generic file names like "ad1.mov" and "ad2.mov"
to load any movie file with that name so that you don't have to go back and reencode
your movie anytime an ad changes.
- Web Poster (QuickTime):
This lets you select a frame that the user will then see while the movie is loading.
Clicking on the poster starts the movie playing. It also sets the preview of the
QuickTime movie, which can be useful because the default QuickTime preview is
the first frame of the movie, which is often black and tells you nothing about
the file.
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