Editors' Review
Download.com staff
QT Sync for Mac gives you pinpoint control as you watch movies on your Mac, and it offers versatility when you want to save movies, as well. With this app, you can quickly move back and forth through the movie, select tracks for editing, and save the movie in multiple smaller files.
This app has a lot of features, and the Help document outlines them all clearly and succinctly. The controls are listed along with their hot keys, so you can hide the controller and navigate the movie without losing any part of your screen. With the Hidden Controller, you can adjust volume, skip to the next or last frame, go to the start or end of the movie, rewind and fast forward, go to fullscreen, and play or pause playback. There are also Advanced Options for playing the last seconds again, selecting the next track for editing, and for changing frames, Msec, and timescale. When you want to save a movie, there are several formats for you to choose from. For instance, you can save a self-contained movie file that requires nothing else to play back. This may be convenient, but it can also take up a lot of space on your hard drive. If that's something you're concerned with, you can break the movie down into a smaller file called a "reference movie," which contains all of the information needed to play back the movie, but doesn't store any of the audio or visual data. You'll have to have that data somewhere else if you want to play the movie again, but the smaller reference movie will save hard drive space in the meantime.
This app is free, and it can rerender movie files into several different formats including DV, MPEG4, QuickTime Movie, and more. QT Sync runs well, and once you get the hang of the controls, you can navigate quickly and smoothly.
