Live Stage Professional from Totally Hip Software is a QuickTime authoring package which takes full advantage of the many capabilities of QuickTime and even extends them. Just the fact that it supports all the different QuickTime media and track types is a big plus.

Live Stage Pro can directly edit the:

• Sprite Track - a visual track in which sprite samples are stored. Scripts can be applied to create custom behaviors that give sprites their interactive nature.
• Instrument Track - a track in which lists of instruments are stored for use in movies. Instruments can be MIDI instruments, QuickTime Music Synthesizer instruments or sampled sounds.
• Effect Track - a track where effect samples are stored. Effect tracks are used to add special visual effects and transitions to the movie.
• Tween Track - performs time interpolations between values of various data types that may then be used as a source in another track. Tweens can be used for things such as creating animations over time, or fading a sprite over time.
• Modifier Track - used as a source of data for properties to be applies to objects or samples in another track. They are different from tweens in that tweens generate values through algorithms, while modifiers provide values specified by the creator.
• Picture Track - stores pictures or images as samples for display.
• Text and Chapter Tracks - stores the actual text (with font and style information) in each sample instead of an image. This means that text tracks are very compact.
• Macromedia Flash Track - where Macromedia Flash content is stored as samples, which can be enhanced with QScripts.

QScripts are Live Stage's scripting language to control effects which you could not control otherwise. Some of QScript¹s features include:

• Local and Global Variables,
• Operators for Math,
• Conditional Statements and
• Looping Constructs .

Apple Script is the other scripting supported by Live Stage Pro, and is used for task automation.