Nearly every aspect of the program has been upgraded, enhanced, or accelerated, starting with the fact that Spike can now handle any movie a user might want to apply it to: flattened, cross-platformed, data-fork-only, movies with strange resource ids, movies created by much earlier versions of QuickTime (back to QuickTime 1.0), and any combination thereof.
Current QuickTime compression software reports the average data rate of files; many people mistakenly use this figure to make decisions about the suitability of compressed video for their playback targets. A QuickTime movie can have a perfectly acceptable average data rate while still containing data spikes that will seriously disrupt playback on any machine. Spike identifies these problems and offers a suite of options for controlling their detection. Other features include detailed data-rate graphs, "Spike Alerts" and reports in frames-per-second and SMPTE, several preview options, and batch processing.
Spike automates techniques that YAV developed while compressing more than a million frames of QuickTime for the award-winning LEGO CD-ROM released earlier this year. According to Christopher Yavelow, co-author of "Mastering the World of QuickTime" (Random House) and lead programmer for Spike, "Spike can optionally utilize log files generated by Terran's popular Movie Cleaner Pro and Media Cleaner Pro and this can accelerate Spike's batch analyses."
An evaluation version is available at http://www.yav.com/docs/SpikeDL.html. Registered users of Spike have access to 63 presets that are fine-tuned to address nearly every conceivable QuickTime deployment scenario.
The following URLs provide additional information:
Spike URL (with tutorial, docs, and screen shots): http://www.yav.com/docs/Spike.html
Spike 1.0 Press Release: http://www.yav.com/docs/SpikePR.html
World Wide Web site of YAV Interactive Media: http://www.yav.com
Representative Interactive Media Portfolio: http://www.yav.com/docs/Media.html
YAV Client List: http://www.yav.com/docs/Clients.html
###
Spike and YAV are trademarks of YAV Interactive Media. QuickTime is a trademark of Apple Compuer, Inc. Movie Cleaner Pro and Media Cleaner Pro are trademarks of Terran Interactive.