The pro version of the QuickTime 5 Player application is a handy tool for working with QuickTime movies and media. This appendix takes you on a quick tour of its editing menus, dialog boxes, and panels. To get more information about its movie-playing controls, choose On-line QuickTime Player Help in the player's Help menu.

By default, QuickTime Player is configured as exactly that a player. You'll be using it for editing, compositing, cropping, and other activities, though, so the first thing you should do is increase its preferred memory allocation. Exactly how you go about that depends on your operating system, but it works the same way as all the other applications programs on your computer. Whatever the default allocation is, you should double it. You should also set the Player Preferences to open movies in a new player window. Do this using either the Edit>Preferences menu choice or the QuickTime Player>Preferences menu choice in QuickTime Player.

Editing

Now then. We'll start by looking at the commonest editing operations, such as selecting part of one movie and pasting it into another. Later on we'll talk about the Properties window, in which you can make deeper structural changes to a movie.