What the world needs is an approachable, affordable QuickTime moviemaking application. If you don’t need — or can’t afford — a high-end program like Adobe Premiere ($695), you might well find what you’re looking for in VideoFusion’s new QuickFlix.
QuickFlix offers a set of basic tools for combining digitized video, animations, still pictures, sound, and text into QuickTime movies. Let’s say you want to make a movie of your company’s recent junket to Hawaii. You might start out with a slow-motion shot of your boss running down the beach; opening credits roll by while soft Hawaiian music plays in the background. The picture then dissolves into a shot of a meeting; a semitransparent chart overlays the sales director as she gives her speech, showing pertinent figures as she talks. In the final scene, a colorized sunset fades to black as the narrator summarizes the meeting, and the words The End zoom into the frame. You can do all of this (and more) with QuickFlix — and do it pretty painlessly at that.
QuickFlix borrows some of its interface from the company’s other product, VideoFusion. But while VideoFusion focuses on special effects for QuickTime movies, QuickFlix lets you make entire movies, which can include colorization, scene transitions, slow or fast motion, chroma-key overlays, and titling.
You build your movies in a storyboard view. You start by dragging a QuickTime movie clip or a PICT-format graphic into one of the squares in the storyboard; then you can drag clips within the storyboard to reorder scenes. To view or edit a movie frame-by-frame, you enter the time-line view, where you can delete frames and add or delete sound; also, you can include the sound track of a video clip, or add your own music, sounds, or narration to a scene. A player view lets you watch a clip, a portion of a movie, or an entire movie; you can also use the player to select just a section of a clip.
Various menu items let you reverse, speed up, or slow down a scene; add transition effects such as fades, wipes, and zooms; layer one movie clip over another or a movie over a still image; colorize a scene; and apply effects such as negative, posterize, and mosaic. The program’s titling feature is versatile, allowing you to set the text’s font, weight, size, and color, and add styles such as shadow or outline. You can make titles scroll horizontally or vertically, and you can even combine titles with other effects, using layering to view a scene through a title, or using other effects to zoom or fade a title. (Note: The titling feature is currently incompatible with the Suitcase extension; turn off Suitcase if you want to apply titles.) As you make a movie, you set QuickTime parameters such as frames per second and the amount and type of compression.
With QuickFlix, you can combine existing QuickTime movie clips into a presentation or record your own clips from within the program if you have a video-digitizing board. (The recording function didn’t work well with my VideoSpigot card, frequently hanging or quitting the program. The solution suggested by VideoFusion’s tech-support staff helped somewhat, but I still experienced intermittent problems while recording.)
QuickFlix is easy to learn, and you can get right to work by following the tutorials, which include video and still clips that you use to create a movie. While the movie you make in the tutorial isn’t likely to win any awards — scenes include a pie chart overlaying some flamingos and a cityscape that cross-fades into a tree trunk — it does introduce you to many of the program’s features. The QuickFlix manual is adequate, if a little terse.
Although QuickFlix provides a good set of special effects, don’t expect the range of effects found in more sophisticated programs such as VideoFusion or Premiere. Missing are fancy effects like pan-zoom-rotate, rotoscope, morph, and mesh warp. But QuickFlix is considerably cheaper than those programs and is not intended to compete with them. If you’ve used another moviemaking or effects program, you might find fault with some of the QuickFlix effects; when layering clips, for example, I missed the ability to adjust the tolerance of the background color, which allows you to make a background transparent if it’s not a uniform color. However, if you’re looking for an inexpensive program that gives you access to moviemaking basics, QuickFlix is the way to go. It’s a great program for digital-video beginners, people who want to quickly create business presentations, or makers of home movies who can’t afford a high-end program.
Fenton, Erfert. (February 1994). QuickFlix 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 66).
VideoFusion
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
4 / 
2021-11-28 / 
4d822131e6d7010660cd462f9a0115f4d1d6c279 / 
/ 
quickflix.img_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
