I’m always a bit leery of programs trying to be too many things at once. My theory is that if I need to cut something, I’m going to reach for my scissors before I go looking for my Swiss Army knife. This is why, until recently, I have chosen to overlook the QuickTime editing ability found in GoLive. GoLive has included this capability since version 4, but it made no sense to me that I would opt to edit my QuickTime movies in a Web-page editor rather than a program designed specifically for this task. Programs such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects or Premiere, or even Apple’s iMovie seem like the obvious choice for movie-editing of this nature.
With the release of GoLive 5.0, however, and Adobe’s decision to further develop the GoLive QuickTime editor, I decided to give it a second look. What I discovered was a feature-rich module that gives some of the dedicated QuickTime editing tools a run for their money while providing a simple interface to perform key editing functions tailored for Web publishing. Here we’ll focus on the more powerful QuickTime editing features we found in GoLive.
Before You Explore
Before setting out to explore GoLive 5.0’s movie-editing features, make sure you’re correctly set up that you have some footage at the ready:
- If you need a video file to play with, feel free to download the one I used for this story, either for the Mac or Windows.
- Check that you have the QuickTime module installed within GoLive. If you don’t see Movie in your GoLive menubar then you probably don’t have it loaded. Go to Edit > Preferences > Modules and check on the QuickTime module.
- Be sure to have QuickTime on your computer. Adobe recommends having the latest version loaded.
- I’ll be discussing GoLive 5.0, but movie-editing capabilities first appeared in GoLive 4.0, so this article will be largely applicable even if you haven’t upgraded.
- Round up a few media files of different types to experiment with. If you upgraded to QuickTime Pro, you should have the ability to download just about any movie file found on the Web. I urge you to read the site’s copyright policy and use these files only for experimenting, not for public display. Collect some music (MIDI) or sound (AIFF) files as well as any still images you have handy.
- Adobe Photoshop, Adobe LiveMotion, or Macromedia Flash are essential if you’d like to create sprites or composite Flash SWFs in your QuickTime movies.
Multiple Timelines
Adobe’s decision to rename the “Track Editor” in GoLive 4 to “TimeLine Window” in GoLive 5 could cause some confusion: The TimeLine Editor is the interface window used to create and edit dynamic HTML animations, whereas the TimeLine Window is used to create and edit QuickTime movies. Each feature is tapped from different areas of the program, however, which should alleviate some confusion.
The TimeLine Window
Laying Down Tracks
To start editing QuickTime movies in GoLive you can either open up an existing movie or create a new one from scratch. You open a movie just as you would any other file, by selecting File > Open. GoLive realizes the file is a QuickTime movie and brings it up in the Movie Viewer. The Movie Viewer follows GoLive’s tabbed workflow convention. You have a Preview tab for previewing your movie and a Layout tab for editing. If you would rather create a QuickTime movie instead of opening an existing one, simply select File > New Special > QuickTime Movie.
Once you have an open movie, select Show TimeLine Window under the Movie menu. The TimeLine Window should look familiar to anyone who has spent any time in Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or Avid Cinema. This window, along with the Inspector palette, is where you’ll end up spending most of your time. From here you can bring in new tracks, adjust track lengths, and create sample tracks much as with any other video editor.
Adding various types of tracks to your movie is done by dragging the track icon from the QuickTime tab of the Objects palette to the TimeLine Window. Afterwards, go to the Inspector palette to load your chosen file or edit the settings. Text tracks require you to create a Sample track that lives below the main Text track you drag into the TimeLine Window. A Sample track is a sort of child track to the Text track that houses your content.
Click the twistdown to the left of your Text track to reveal the Samples track. Use the Create Sample tool, which resembles a pencil, found in the cluster of tools located in the upper left-hand corner of the TimeLine Window to draw out a Sample track. Then be sure to have your Sample track selected to enter your text in the Text Inspector and assign any properties you’d like. Almost every track type provides a blending mode to set transparency options with other tracks underneath. My best advice here is to experiment with each track type and blend mode to fully realize all the possibilities.
When laying down new track types, don’t forget to study the various tabs presented in the Inspector palette. And one really good tip is to consult the Acrobat PDF version of the GoLive 5 User Manual found on the install CD: Adobe decided to cut about 50 pages from the printed manual that can be found on the Acrobat version, which includes a full explanation of all the QuickTime track types.
Flashy Sprites
GoLive 5’s new ability to add and control certain aspects of Flash SWF tracks is a really cool feature. GoLive 5 now allows you to bring in Flash SWFs from Flash or LiveMotion into a QuickTime movie and add actions telling the SWF track to go to a particular label or frame within the Flash file.
Sprites are images to which you can apply actions and set mouse rollovers. A Sprite track relies on a pool of images that are stored within its first keyframe. The images and their assigned actions and rollovers (referred to as “wired sprites”) only get referenced through the rest of the movie, instead of being reloaded in every frame in which they are present. This efficiency results in a much smaller file size and faster loading. GoLive 5 adds a great time-saver for sprites: Import a layered Photoshop file as a Sprite track, and as long as you named your layers with respective rollover states labels, GoLive will automatically set those states up in the Sprite track.
Here’s the finished product. To the raw footage, I added sound, text with an embedded link to Brutus’ home page, a Sprite to mute the volume, and a SWF file containing the animated text at the end of the movie. All editing was done in GoLive 5 except for the SWF, which was whipped out in LiveMotion.
A Pleasant Surprise
Obviously GoLive’s selling point isn’t its ability to edit and add interactivity to movies. However, it rises to the occasion for such tasks surprisingly well, and its movie editing capabilities keep you from having to master programs like Flash or LiveStage Pro, assuming the movie edits you need are relatively simple. So take some time to experiment with this interesting facet of GoLive. You may just find yourself calling upon it when you’d least expect.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on November 15, 2000
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