QuickTime Tip: Fast Start

Just a friendly tip: If you’re compressing a video for the web and you’re using QuickTime to do it, make sure to enable Fast Start. Otherwise, your viewers will have to wait for the entire video to load before they see even the first frame. In my case, that may mean the video is never seen at all.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Open your video in QuickTime.
2. Go to File > Export
3. In the Export drop-down, select Movie to QuickTime Movie and click Options….
4. Configure your video and audio compression settings however you like.
5. Here’s the crucial part: Make sure to check Prepare for Internet Streaming and choose Fast Start from the drop-down menu.

faststart.gif

6. Click OK and then click Save. You should be all set.

About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

4 Comments

ryan

Dude, thank you so much for posting this. You do not know what a big peev it is to have to wait through an entire movie to see it. I usually click to the next page if I have to wait and am sure others do to.

rod

Its that a PC screen shot?
uuuuuuuuh
busted…

tread

if you select ‘fast start:compressed header’ it crunches down the front end just a tad more so the movie loads the first faster and gets a head start…

Paul Ducco

yeah, learnt this one the hard way. none-the-less great tip … particularly for those reels ;)

Comments are closed.