Export multiple movies at once with QuickTime Pro

Aug 22, '05 09:30:00AM

Contributed by: zpjet

The QuickTime Player application in the Pro version of QuickTime behaves very nicely: it allows you to start an export, then close the source movie, open another one, start another export, etc. This is good for overnight jobs, especially when exporting using that cool H264 codec takes quite some time.

[robg adds: When I first tested this, it didn't work for me -- I couldn't open another movie (via drag and drop, double-clicking in the Finder, or using QuickTime's Open dialog box) while the export was going.

Then I tried minimizing the export window to the Dock. Once I did that, then all the usual methods of opening a QuickTime video worked just fine. Using this method, when I started the next export, nothing seemed to happen. But that's because QuickTime uses the already-existing Export window, and just adds the second movie below the first. Since I had the window minimized in the Dock, I couldn't see that.

An anonymous tipster wrote in that "each new export spawns an entirely separate process called QTplayerHelper. Interestingly, this process is given a nice value of 3. Exports can therefore be sped up a bit by re-nicing said process using the Terminal."]

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