Hey all, this is probably more of a quicktime question than an After Effects question, but I'll ask anyway.

I export a non-streaming QuickTime movie from After Effects, with Fast Start checked. On my site(www.peanutbutterpistol.com, people click a link and a window pops up containing the QuickTime movie. The problem I'm having is that the window remains blank until the movie is FULLY loaded. This obviously means Fast Start isn't working, but the more troubling thing is, if I'm dealing with, say, a 50 MB movie, that's a real long time to wait seeing NOTHING. Most users figure something's broken and close the window.

On other site, like games.ign.com, when you click on a movie link a window will pop up and so will the not-yet-fully-loaded QuickTime movie, paused on the first frame. On the bottom, the length-bar fills with grey to represent how far along the movie is in downloading. What am I doing wrong? Why don't my loading movies come up and load in front of the viewer (paused on the first frame) like this?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks,

Joe

I think you want it streaming.

I believe the setting you want is "Hinted Streaming." Click on the pull-down menu where you choose Fast Start and choose Hinted Streaming instead. This is the setting that I use for the Quicktime videos embedded on my site and they play exactly how you want yours to play.

I see... And I'm guessing my server will need to have QuickTime Streaming capabilities to use Hinted Streaming?

No, it won't. The setting just affects the way that QT creates the file and plays it back. Hinted Streaming is sort of a pseudo-streaming. I just use the embed command to put the player on the page and that's it.

I believe hinting is something completely different.

Two things to look at:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tools_tips/tutorials/faststart.html
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tools_tips/tutorials/httpvsrtsp.html

The first indicates that you have to use Embed tags to get browsers to do fast start correctly. The second just tells the differences between streaming and fast start.

This is a great place to look for help:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tools_tips/tutorials/

Just as a heads up, if you own the server your site is on, you can get QT streaming for free I believe.

Mark

Interesting. My understanding of hinted streaming was learned from a Mac web designer... For what it's worth, all the quicktime videos on my site are created using hinted streaming (no "fast start") and posted on my site using the "embed" command, and they act the way that Joe is trying to do... hmm. I'll try to do some experiments at some point and see what happens. Thanks for the link.

Hinted won't stop it from working, but I believe the key is to use Embed tags to force the plug-in to load it. If you just use <a href="movie.mov">Movie Name</a> then the browser can end up doing anything when you click on the link. If you embed the movie in the page then you get the desired results (at least in my experiments, the Apple pages ARE confusing to say the least).

The way I do it, and I've spent a lot of time at the Apple web site reading up on it, is encode them with the Fast Start Compressed header setting and embed them in the page.

If you go to www.indecisionthemovie.com you can see the results. Many of theses clips are 10 megs and over and they all start playing when enough of the file has downloaded.

One other thing to check is the QuickTime preferences for your connection type and speed. If you have it set for too slow of a speed, QT will think that it has to load more of the movie than it needs to in order for it to play with out catching up to the download speed.