BitJazz: Support: SheerVideo: User Manual: Apple QuickTime Player: Playback

SheerVideo User Manual
Apple QuickTime Player
Playback

Once you open a SheerVideo movie or image sequence, QuickTime Player will automatically display the first frame in a player window. As for any QuickTime movie or slide show, press the buttons at the bottom of the player window to go to the beginning, rewind, play, fast-forward, or go to the end of the movie; or drag the timeline cursor around to scrub through the frames.

QuickTime Player only permits you to set a single option for SheerVideo playback: High Quality Mode.

SheerVideo Perfect-Fidelity Playback: The Sheer codecs are designed to be strictly nondestructive, and try to prevent QuickTime from inadvertently losing image information by accidentally choosing the wrong destination pixel format for the codec, and thus reducing the sample precision, changing the chroma sampling, or converting the color space without increasing the sample precision.

However, SheerVideo does permit destructive pixel-format conversion for cases when the user needs this capability. This capability is controlled by QuickTime's High Quality Mode checkbox. By default, High Quality Mode is turned off, because lower quality usually implies greater speed.

To ensure that an open SheerVideo QuickTime movie, slide show, or image sequence is decoded to a compatible pixel format for perfect-fidelity playback:

Select Window > Show Movie Properties… in QuickTime Player's menu bar to bring up the Movie Properties window for the movie.

Select the Video Track in the track list in the Movie Properties window.

If there are multiple video tracks, look at the Format column to find the Sheer tracks.

Select the Visual Settings tab in the Movie Properties window.

Check the High Quality Enabled check box at the bottom right of the Visual Settings card.

To make High Quality mode the default:

Select QuickTime Player > Preferences… to bring up QuickTime Player's Preferences dialog box.

Select the General tab at the top left of the Preferences dialog box.

In the Movies section, check the Use high quality video setting when available box.

Note that, while checking the High Quality Enabled box prevents SheerVideo from converting to a lower-quality pixel format, it does not prevent QuickTime or the application from doing its own conversion to a lower-quality pixel format. In some cases, information loss is inevitable, such as when displaying 10-bit data to an 8-bit monitor, editing 8-bit RGB in an 8-bit Y'CbCr editor or editing 8-bit Y'CbCr in an 8-bit editor, or exporting 4:4:4 data to a 4:2:2 codec. In such cases, SheerVideo's pixel-format conversion is generally of higher quality, especially when converting between RGB and Y'CbCr, where SheerVideo uses Synchromy™ technology.

To convert between RGB and Y'CbCr color spaces, SheerVideo uses BitJazz's patented Synchromy™ technology, (US Patent 7,659,911) which is more accurate than any other color-conversion method.