This article lists the steps you must go through to create movies using Final Cut Pro and embed them into a Web page being served by Mac OS X Server. Below is a summary of the overall process, followed by step-by-step instructions.

How to serve embedded QuickTime Streaming Movies using QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS) and Mac OS X Server.

How QuickTime Streaming Works

When a client uses a web browser such as Navigator or Internet Explorer to view a web page that contains streaming movies, a whole chain of events occurs which makes it possible for the user to actually see the movies. A brief understanding of these events should make it clearer why the steps we follow in this article are necessary.

1. A user clicks on a link to your Web page. An HTTP command is sent to the Mac OS X Server hosting your page.

2. The Apache server software running in the background on the Mac OS X Server intercepts the HTTP command and returns to the user a web page with a Referencing Movie embedded in it.

3. The Referencing Movie contains an RSTP command, which in turn is sent to the QuickTime Streaming Server software, also running in the background on the same Mac OS X Server.

4. The QTSS software intercepts the RTSP command, substitutes the Referencing Movie with the requested streaming movie, and sends it to the user.

This article covers, in brief, how to create movies for QTSS streaming, (using Final Cut Pro as an example) and then shows into which directories they'll be placed on your Mac OS X server in order to make them accessible. Before moving on to the actual step by step details, here is an overview of the process as presented in this document.

1. On your video editing workstation, edit your video clip using an application such as Final Cut Pro (FCP). After editing, export a self-contained movie that has been both compressed and hinted (explanation below) using either FCP or the Quicktime Player.

2. Make sure the QuickTime Streaming Server software is installed on the Mac OS X server you'll be using as your HTML server. Refer to article 31016: " QuickTime Streaming Server: Verifying Installation ".

3. Place your compressed and hinted movies into the Media Directory (default is /Local/Library/QuickTimeStreaming/Movies) of your Mac OS X Server. This directory is specified by the QuickTimeStreamingAdministration application, and can differ from the default directory presented above.

4. Using the methods outlined below, create referencing movies from the streaming movies you just placed into the Media Directory.

5. Use standard HTML Quicktime embed tags to link the referencing movies you just created to your web pages. Place both the HTML pages and the referencing movies into the Webserver/Documents directory (default is /Local/Library/WebServer/Documents).

1. Edit your movies in Final Cut Pro.

2. Once you're finished editing your final sequence, select it and choose Export Quicktime Movie from the File menu. The following dialog box appears:

Figure 1 , Export Quicktime Movie dialog box

3. Click the Options button and the following dialog box appears. The compression settings shown in this document are for example purposes only. You are encouraged to experiment on your own to find the optimal settings for your application.

Figure 2 , Movie Settings dialog box

• In Video Settings, you can pick Sorensen or Cinepak. 12fps is a common frame rate for compressed movies playing over high-speed lines. The target data rate is up to you, but 90-40 Kbs or smaller is recommended for movies compressed with the Sorensen codec. This number varies depending on what kind of Internet connection your target audience has.
• Leave Filter unchanged.
• Set your Frame Size to be 320x240 or smaller (256 x192 is popular).
• In Sound Settings, use the Qdesign Music 2 codec, with the Sample rate set to 22.050 kHz, and the Sample size set to16 bit.
• Finally, in the "Prepare for Internet Streaming" section, choose Hinted Streaming from the default menus.

Locating Your Movies and Pages on the Server:

1. Once your movies are finished, use your favorite Web page design tool to create the Web pages your movies will live in. Use the embed tags to actually place the movies on the page.

Note : For more information on the embed tags, go to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/authoring/embed.html

2. Now you're ready to copy the appropriate files into the appropriate places.

Note : All the HTML pages you create refer to the location of both graphics files and movie files by relative pathnames. This is a UNIX convention, and works the same way as putting graphics files into a Web page.

For example, when creating pages, use one folder to hold all the documents you'll be linking together for your web site. We'll call this folder "WorkDirectory." Directly inside this folder will be your index.html page, (this is the first page that will load when someone accesses your Web site) and then that page links to other pages and files either in this folder or inside of other folders located inside of WorkDirectory. It is a good idea to keep all your streaming movies together inside their own folder. We'll call this folder "myMovieFiles," and it also is located inside of WorkDirectory.

When you use the Quicktime embed tags to place a streaming movie directly into a page, it looks something like this:

<p><embed src="myMovieFiles/pq_hinted.mov" autoplay="false" controller="true"
cache="true" width="256" height="192"></center><p>

Where the text myMovieFiles/pg_hinted.mov is a path name that specifies that the embedded movie is located in the folder (or directory, in Mac OS X speak) myMovieFiles, which is inside the current directory. This means when you copy the nested set of files and folders from your WorkDirectory folder onto the server, as long as you don't change any file or directory names, all the HTML code works unaltered.

Here's another example path:
folder1/folder2/fileName.mov

Which is the same as saying that fileName.mov is inside of folder2, which in turn is inside of folder1.

3. In order for the server to be able to serve your pages properly, you must have all your files in the right places. All HTML pages, your index.html page and other directories containing pages, images, and movies linked to your index.html page, all get copied into the directory on the Mac OS X Server partition called:

/Local/Library/WebServer/Documents

Note : Mac OS X Server is case sensitive, so directory and file names must be typed exactly as they appear. It's also very important not to change the names of any of the files or directories that you copy onto the server, or otherwise change the way things are organized by moving files from one directory to another. (There is one exception, noted below.) If you do, you're going to have to edit the pages manually on the server using a text editor, renaming all the paths to reflect the changes in name and location that you made.

4. There's one important exception to the above. All the hinted QuickTime movies you embedded in your web page, (which you put inside the myMovieFiles folder on your authoring computer) go inside the media folder you specified when you configured the QuickTime Server software. The default directory for the Quicktime Streaming Server software is:

/Local/Library/QuickTimeStreaming/Movies

If you don't put your hinted movies into this directory, they won't stream. In order for your web pages to still have these movies embedded, however, you'll need to place referencing movies into the myMovieFiles directory now located in the WebServer/Documents directory. These referencing movies point to the movies now located in the QuickTimeStreaming/Movies directory, enabling everything to work the way it should.

5. Make your referencing movies.

A referencing movie is a movie that selects another movie to play in its place. Referencing movies are very small, consisting only of an instruction which points to the original movie file located in /Local/Library/QuickTimeStreaming/Movies .

You create a referencing movie by following these steps:

1. Ensure your hinted movie into the QTSS Media Folder on the server.

2. From a remote computer, open the Quicktime Player, choose Open URL from the File menu, and type rtsp://server.com / myMovie.mov in the resulting dialog box, where myMovie.mov is the name of the served movie you want to make a referencing movie of.

3. The Quicktime Player informs you that it is connecting, buffering, and negotiating. Then, when the movie starts to play, choose Save As from the File menu and click Self Contained Movie.

4. The resulting Quicktime movie is the referencing movie, and it should be copied back into the directory that you originally placed all the hinted movies, myMovieFiles.