Text tracks

Text can play an important role in your movies. It can serve as titles, subtitles, credits, teleprompter text, or the complete content of the movie (as in an all-text commercial). A text track is also used to contain information for chapter tracks and HREF tracks.

A text track is very low bandwidth, so it costs little to add one to your movie. Moreover, because text tracks are in vector form, you can resize the movie (by dragging at the lower right corner) and the text will still appear perfectly smooth. So it makes sense to use a text track any time you need text, and not to use a bitmap text image created in, say, Adobe Photoshop. You can specify text font, color, size, and style; apply drop shadows; make text scroll or crawl across the screen; and overlay it onto a video track. Text in a movie is also randomly searchable by the viewer.

Create a text movie

Screenshot: Text Tracks

To create a text movie, you need a word processing application that can generate a standard ASCII plain text file. For example: Microsoft Word and Save as Text-only.

Step 1

First, type the text and save it as a text-only file.

Step 2

In QuickTime Pro, choose Open File from the File menu.

Step 3

Choose the text file.

Step 4

The text is perfectly laid out as a series of text-only slides. QuickTime creates one video frame (or slide) for each paragraph of text.

 

Edit text with Descriptors

You may want to change the text display timing, set special attributes, or do other modifications to the track. You can do that with QuickTime’s text formatting tags, called text descriptors. Here’s how:

Step 1

Choose Export... from the File menu. Set the Export popup to “Text to Text” and set the Use: popup to Text with Descriptors. Click Save to create a text file with descriptors.

Step 2

Open the file in any word processor. You’ll see your original text with descriptors added. It will look something like the text at the left.

Step 3

The descriptors are fairly self-explanatory. If you want to change the font to Helvetica and the duration of the text "slides" from 2 seconds apart to 4 seconds apart. Change {font:Geneva} to {font:Helvetica} and change the 2 in [00:00:02.000] to a 4, change the 4 in [00:00:04.000] to an 8, and so on. Save the file as plain text and import into QuickTime. List of QuickTime text descriptors.

Step 4

The text is perfectly laid out as a series of text-only slides. QuickTime creates one video frame (or slide) for each paragraph of text.

{QTtext} {font:Geneva} {plain} {anti-alias:on} {size:12} {textColor: 65535, 65535, 65535} {backColor: 0, 0, 0} {justify:center} {timeScale:1000} {width:160} {height:48} {timeStamps:absolute} {language:0} {textEncoding:0}
[00:00:00.000]
Text Slide 1
[00:00:02.000]
Text Slide 2
[00:00:04.000]
Text Slide 3