Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

13 Oct 00

Architosh QuickTime Live Summary Notes

QuickTime Live Notes

The big news for Apple this week was the announced preview of QuickTime 5, now available from Apple's Web site for Macintosh only. A preview will be available for Windows later this year.

QuickTime 5 itself will ship later next year, most likely at the Mac OS X introduction.

QuickTime 5 Gets Much Better for Architects and other Technical Designers

QuickTime has always been the industry leader for architects, interior designers and others in the visual technical fields. The code is at the heart of just about all rendering and animation CAD programs, including such stalwart applications in the field as FormZ, Strata Vision (Studio Pro), Electric Image, VectorWorks and ArchiCAD.

The good news this time is that QuickTime 5 adds more 3D technologies and expands virtual reality to cubic dimensions. New in the VR department is the ability to experience cubic panos, ie, to see completely up and down in 360 degree directions. This spherical ability is extremely useful and—depending on the environment—can be an awesome visual experience.

Apple has a number of links to some great examples of cubic VR's, including the Eiffel Tower (both the fake and the real deal). There were a number of of third party announcements to be made regarding cubic VR ability in QuickTime 5 (see below).

As noted below there are additional 3D streaming abilities built into QT 5. Some of them involve new file formats supported in QuickTime 5.

Developers Support QuickTime 5

A number of interesting developer announcements came out of QuickTime Live. First off, On2Inc. will be providing a new type of codec for encoding full-screen, full-motion, television quality video streaming for QuickTime. Better yet, the QuickTime 5 Pro version allows for customers encode video in this format for distribution. To get those iMac movies ready for full screen action! This is great for designers using iMovie in their presentations (could be in their AppleWorks 6 or MS Office 2001 presentations?).

Pulse Entertainment has good news for 3D users! They announced real-time streaming 3D technology for new and existing QuickTime Media Players, all via QuickTime 5's new component download feature.

Panoscan has new VR technology for taking cubic virtual reality photos. And DDD is offering QuickTime more 3D technology for mainstream entertainment. Lastly, Internet Pictures Corp. has announced their new iPIX support for QuickTime 5.

Apple's QuickTime instrumental in Star Wars: Episode 1 Previsuals

According to a story at MacCentral, David Dozeretz spoke at QuickTime Live on Wednesday about QuickTime's role with Star Wars and other big-name films.

In a two year period David and his small team of four people created about 8,000 - 12,000 pre-visualization films for George Lucas and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) using QuickTime editing tools and key Macintosh products like Adobe After Effects and Electric Image. This off-the-shelf QuickTime technology saves the film project tons of money on testing film sequences which might require extensive resources. To learn more read on.