Mobile Video: Working with MPEG-4 Clips on Mobile Phones
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Converting 3GPP Videos

But what about editing these files, and converting the clips for playback on other platforms? The easiest answer is Apple's QuickTime Pro. Beyond the playback features in the free QuickTime Player, Apple offers the QuickTime Pro upgrade for $29.95 (as the website notes, "why, that's just eight cents a day for a year"). You just purchase a key code online, enter the registration code in the Player, and suddenly lots of new menu options are enabled for editing and exporting clips.

QuickTime Player 7, showing the available editing options in the menus (which can be enabled by purchasing the QuickTime Pro upgrade)

QuickTime Pro, on either platform, is a wonderfully simple yet effective tool for editing clips. You can trim individual clips by adjusting in and out points, and build longer clips by simply cutting and pasting together multiple clips. (QuickTime 7 Pro for Windows is available as a quite functional Preview version, with the full version to be available by the end of summer 2005.)

For more extensive editing, you can lean on the QuickTime platform to enable more advanced applications: as Apple adds new formats to the underlying QuickTime platform, they become available to the applications that run on top of it. This happens by default on the Macintosh, since QuickTime is the base media architecture, and also works with QuickTime-aware applications under Windows--many of which therefore use QuickTime for exporting files in MPEG-4 formats.

If you want to pass 3GPP files on to other applications or systems that may not support the latest QuickTime formats, you also can use QuickTime Pro to convert these files, edit movie properties, and export the result in a wide variety of formats. QuickTime Pro is something of a universal media format converter for both Mac and Windows, supporting an amazing profusion of image, audio, and video file formats and compression codecs, as well as built-in video enhancements and effects.

For example, to pass a 3GPP file on to a traditional Windows application as an AVI file, choose Export, then "Movie to AVI," and then choose a widely available older codec like Indeo or Cinepak (this can expand the file from 178 KB for 3GPP to more like 2 MB). Use better quality for the compression to avoid introducing additional compression artifacts to the already blocky video, or even use no compression (expanding to around 20 MB).

QuickTime Pro, showing export formats

QuickTime Pro, Compression Settings dialog for exporting to Windows AVI format, showing the supported video compression codecs

Exported AVI file playing in Windows Media Player

Another possibility for MPEG-4 files is to export as a QuickTime Movie using an older codec like Sorenson Video that can be playable on a wider variety of older machines.

QuickTime Pro, Video Compression Settings dialog for exporting to QuickTime Movie format, showing the supported video compression codecs

When mixing low-resolution 3GPP footage with standard-resolution material in a video editor, you also can enlarge the video resolution when exporting as a QuickTime movie. Use the Size option in the Movie Settings dialog to enter a new pixel width and height. Just don't be surprised if the higher-resolution video looks rather crummy, since you're blowing up very low resolution video that already has compression blocks. But hey, it's video of the moment that you were unlikely to grab in any other way.

QuickTime Pro, Movie Settings dialog for selecting the codec Settings, additional Filter operations, and changing the Size when exporting to a QuickTime movie

QuickTime movie of a 176 by 144 3GPP file resized to 640 by 480 (showing low resolution and compression artifacts in the original tiny file)