Murphy Mac

You don’t need third party tools to keep your Quicktime movie always on top. Select your movie in Finder, hit Shift-Command-Y, and your movie opens in a Sticky.  (The keyboard shortcut invokes an item in Services)  Set the Sticky to float and the movie stays on top of other windows. Now you can get some work done with the movie playing in the corner, but your other windows won’t cover the video.

You could also look at this as an easier way to play your Quicktime file back borderless. They won’t be perfectly borderless, like Murphy showed you in this tip. But setting the Sticky color to gray makes it look pretty close. The extra screen real estate is nice to have on a laptop. And Murphy’s other Quicktime tip didn’t have the Always on Top option.

It’s a little surprising Apple hasn’t added an Always on Top menu to Quicktime. But this seems like a reasonable workaround. Take a look as Murphy plays with Quicktime and Sticky notes in the screencast.

With Quicktime Pro you can add chapter markers to your movie and help viewers jump from one part to another with ease. The steps aren’t as friendly as iMovie - but you won’t have to import your video into iMovie either!

Apple has scripts on their web site that automate tons of Quicktime functions. If you didn’t think Quicktime Pro could do much check out the scripts. It’s amazing just how much this application can do.

That’s enough of the sales pitch. If you need Quicktime Pro chances are you already know about it.

The screencast is loosely based on this tutorial from the Apple site. But the Apple version says to activate chapters on the text track - which didn’t work for Murphy. In the screencast you’ll notice Murphy activates chapters on the video track. It could be an error in the Apple tutorial - or it could be a version compatibility issue.

Here’s a little more information on text tracks and Quicktime. Click to download the movie used in the screencast and a sample text file.

Note: Apple announced changes to the Macbook Pro line today. If you don’t need the very latest check Amazon. At post time they have some previous generation models listed with a $150 rebate.

Making your movie play back without borders is a little simpler than creating a skin. All you need is a solid black image file, at least as large as your movie. And a text file. And your movie.

Why would you want to do this? That’s a good question. Maybe you want to play a movie back while you’re working and screen space is tight. Maybe you’re using a computer for some kind of demo kiosk and you’d like the video playing back as part of your demonstration. Maybe you’re a minimalist. Maybe you don’t want to do this…

To be honest, Murphy stumbled into this Quicktime behavior when developing the screencast for creating a Quicktime skin.

In the screencast you’ll see the text file is the glue that holds the movie and the image file together. To make your production portable you’d have to export it into a self-contained movie.

If you want to take this a little further see the screencast on Quicktime skins.

You can also download the files used in the screencast.



If you distribute Quicktime content without embedding it in a web page you might want to apply a skin to your video. Murphy’s covered that before. The downside of the skin is that the controls don’t show up, unless you create some - which requires some commitment to the task.

Your viewers might not know how to initiate playback on your Quicktime movie, unless you’ve added a title page with instructions to hit the space bar. Making the movie auto-play could alleviate some confusion.

The screencast shows how to make your movie auto-play and auto-close. The interface also has an option for auto-quitting. Follow this link to learn how to make a skin for your Quicktime movie or click here for instructions on making a title page.

A skin really sets your movie apart and draws attention. Someone might even think you know what you’re doing. Maybe.

Note: This requires Quicktime Pro.

Admittedly, it’s frustrating that Apple doesn’t include Quicktime Pro with OS X. To be fair, you get iMovie with a Mac purchase, and that more than evens you out with the Windows crowd.

For some, Quicktime’s simple appearance is deceptive. It’s quite powerful, and can be automated for all kinds of repetitious tasks. People who need that functionality probably have no qualms about shelling out thirty bucks. But what about the rest of us?

When you just want to make some quick cuts or export to a new format it’s hard to beat QT Pro. You don’t have to pull your movie into a different file format like you do with iMovie. And for many tasks you can simply save your results as a reference movie, without taking up tons of disk space.

But those are things for another day. The screencast shows how to add a title to the beginning of your movie. If you followed Murphy’s instructions on making a Quicktime skin for your movie, you might want to do this so people will know to hit the spacebar for playback.

If you want to see the resulting .mov file (starring Murphy’s cat) from the screencast, download it here.