Quicktime Pro and its horrible interface

I hated Quicktime with a passion for many years.  It was very slow, the compression was horrible, and it just never played right on web pages.  About the only thing it had going for it was the ability to scrub the video frames, which is very useful for animators and video producers.  Before its widespread adoption in the Windows world, there was no promise that the video would even play on a PC.  It just wasn't worth it!
  Now Quicktime Pro, which I've been using for about 2 years now, is much better.  It costs $30 to get a liscense, and I'd love to say that it is worth every penny.  The videos on the web can be a large size, and the compression quality of  the h.264 codec is very good.  The file sizes are small.  Plus a helpful .html document with instructions on embedding the video in a web page. It's totally worth the cost.
  But, God, the interface!!  On Windows the quicktime player is an awkward beast to say the least.  The ability to clip and export a video selection works OK, but the frame markers are very hard to grab, and they often get reset to the start and end frames.
  The 'save for web' option is what really gets me.  The 'browse' option for determining the output directory is in a drop-down menu???  Who puts it there?  And, it always defaults to the desktop.  Who wants to output a video to the desktop EVERY TIME? 
   I have yet to use the features for outputting video for the iPhone, for I don't own one.  The features seem to be added just to boost sales of the device.
  The most glaring omission is the lack of batching capabilities.  I had to output a crunched version of about 35 videos yesterday.  It takes forever!!  All because of the interface.  If I could have batched them all, I could have gone one with my life.
   The files are also named with a '-desktop' suffix, which is utterly annoying.  I could see if you were doing all three output options, for iphone, etc., then you need that suffix, but I never have.  If you are only outputting a desktop version,  the suffix should be omitted.
   Maybe the interface is better on Mac.  I wouldn't put it past Apple.  I truly hope they improve it sometime soon.


 

Rigging ability goes like this: / (up)

On a recent rig, I was really pushed to complete a very advanced, tighter rig than I have usually done.  I learned the ins and outs of stretchy rigging in Maya.

   While I am quite good at the basics of bone placements, constraints, IK/FK switching,  stretchy rigging really pushes everything to the next level.  The setup is pretty complex; there are lots of utility nodes doing on-the-fly computations, and the connections are everywhere.  But in the end, I have a great understanding of the whole stretchy rigging process.  I did 4 limb chains, and a few of those had to be re-done a time or two.

   I'd love to go back to some older rigs and put in some newly-learned controls, but I doubt that would be of any use.  It's moving forward in my skills that I am all about right now, not rehashing the past.

   There are a few characters, however, who would benefit from the new skills.  I will need to budget some time to take their rigs to 'version 2.0'.