omino pixel blog

I hate to admit it, but I only last week started using an Intel-based Macintosh. A quad-core 2.66GHz, to be precise. I guess it does feel faster than the dual-core 1.25GHz G4 it replaces. And I was very very worried about my software not working.

But fortunately, everything actually does still work! I use Photoshop CS2 and After Effects 7.0 and even DVD Studio Pro 4, and they work fine. (Oh, I’ll be getting the latests for them, when I can. This is personal use costs, and I don’t use pirateware, so it may be a little while. And then they should really click right along, huh?)

Anyway, this post is to report that my free QuickTime command-line utilities qt_tools seem to work fine on this here Intel Macintosh! Hooray.

(I’ve heard reports that they can be recompiled for Intel with about a 50% performance improvement. And I’ll be investigating that as time permits, but porting software from big-endian to little-endian, or biendian, is not to be taken too casually.)

But what is qt_tools?

Well, you can get the full schpiel at the qt_tools page but generally, it lets you transform movies and images at the command line. Here’s some examples.

$ qt_export foo.mov foo.mp4                                   # convert a movie to mp4
$ qt_export bar.wav bar.aif                                   # convert a sound file
$ qt_export --sequencerate=30 frame001.jpg framesAsMovie.mov  # import frames to a movie
$ qt_export big.mov --size=80,60 tiny.mov                     # resize a movie

It’s very handy for some kinds of bulk processing, and certain production flows. If you’re into shell scripting — a very retro and powerful technology!