4. Filters

QuickTime Pro offers 13 filters in five categories:

Adjustments: Alpha gain, Brightness and Contrast, HSL Balance, RGB Balance Blur: Blur Filters: Edge Detection, Emboss, General Convolution Sharpen: Sharpen Special Effects: Color Style, Color Tint, Film Noise, Lens Flare

You may have noticed that there appears to be no rotate filter in QuickTime Pro. Actually, there is one, but it’s found in an unusual location. To access the Rotate filter, click Window, Show Movie Properties, Video Track and Visual Settings and then export the file. Note that simply resaving the file will not save a rotated file — it only saves an instruction telling the QuickTime Player to rotate the file when played. The file will still open without being rotated in third-party players such as the VLC Media Player and YouTube. To truly rotate the file, you must export the rotated video.

The other filters are accessed by clicking File, Export, Options and Filter. Unfortunately, there are several issues that arise when working with QuickTime’s filters.

Although there are a total of 15 export formats available (such as AVI, DV Stream and MPEG-4), the only way you can access the filters is if you export to the QuickTime MOV format. If you want to filter and convert to any other format, you’ll first have to filter the video while exporting it as a QuickTime MOV file and then convert the filtered movie to your desired file format. If you’re dealing with a long video and/or slow computer, this can be a ridiculously time consuming task, and as mentioned above, there’s no batch encoder to automate the process.

QuickTime also provides only a small preview window for examining how your filter will affect your video (see the QuickTime filters image, above). The window cannot be resized to present a larger preview window, even though QuickTime Pro for OS X does allow resizing of the preview window.

Finally, although there are blur and sharpen filters, there is no noise-reduction filter. When shooting in less-than-optimal lighting, image noise is a common occurrence, while a noise-reduction filter should be part of even the most basic filter package.

Options to change the dimensions of your video are also limited. Resizing is always available with the QuickTime MOV format. However, many formats, including Windows AVI, have no resizing option available.

TMPGEnc XPress offers a “Filter Catalog” containing 19 filters:

Video Filters: Anti Flicker, Color Correction, Color Phase Correction, Contour, Deinterlace, Gaussian Blur, Ghost Reduction, Picture Crop, Picture Resize, Picture Rotation, Smart Sharpness, Sharpness, Subtitles, Video Fade-in/Fade-out and Video Noise Reduction.

Audio Filters: Audio Fade-in/Fade-out, Audio Noise Reduction, Bilingual Audio and Volume Adjustment.

As you can probably see, the filters that TMPGEnc offers seem far more practical and suited for everyday use than those found in QuickTime Pro. Sure, an emboss filter may be unique, but how often will you find yourself needing one?

A frame from an Embossed QuickTime Pro video, using the mildest Emboss setting

When using TMPGEnc, you can place frequently used filters in a Filter List for easy access, where they’re made available along with a timeline, movie controls and a large preview window.

If you need a closer look, a magnifier is available with up to 8x zoom.

There’s also a histogram and vectorscope available for analyzing color.

TMPGEnc’s Color Correction filter is an unusually powerful piece of color adjustment technology. Color can be fine tuned using five modes: Simple, RGB, YUV, CMYK and HSV. The Simple mode, with its Luminance and Contrast settings, also doubles as a Brightness and Contrast filter. The other four modes all have adjustment Methods available, such as Luminance, Shade Level, Hue and YUV Expansion. This filter far surpasses the color correction capability that QuickTime Pro offers.

Another powerful feature in TMPGEnc that shouldn’t be overlooked is the ability to apply multiple filters at the same time. QuickTime Pro only allows you to apply one filter at a time.