Create QuickTime Preview Files On Your Mac.

QuickTime is one of those built-in gems on your Mac. It reads most movie formats, records and plays audio and video.

So what do you do when you want a quick storyboard of a QuickTime movie? QiPo.

Some Mac utilities are one trick ponies. What they do is what they do and don’t try getting it to do more.

QiPo is one of the one trick pony stable from BeboSoft. It does what it does and no one else does it.

Simply put, QiPo stands for QuickTime in, and Preview out.

So, QiPo takes a QuickTime movie and creates an image which holds sequential frames of the original movie.

That rather simple process includes a preview of the movie.

It’s hard to imagine a simpler utility. Once you set up the preferences for size and saving location, it’s drag and drop.

What you get is a storyboard of your movie, time based, and sequentially selected, and saved as a graphic file.

Save? Yes, in various formats: JPG, BMP, PNG, Photoshop, and so on.

I do plenty of presentations so I tend to collect graphic tools that do different things; I have my stack of one trick ponies.

Some of these presentations find their way into web pages using HTML.

Adding a little extra rodeo trick QiPo will also build web pages in a configurable layout which will host your movie or the animation preview.

In short, the QiPo pony processes most any movie that QuickTime understands, creates previews in various file formats, creates HTML previews in templates of your choice, and has settings galore.

Sorry. Maybe that’s not so much a single trick as it is a set of tricks from a single Mac utility.

Let me apologize, too, because I wasn’t paying attention. My bad.

Jack got me distracted last night on his quest for keyword salvation in iPhoto and I forgot about the deal from MacUpdate which brought the QiPo price down to $12.95 Thursday.

QiPo gets added to my list of need-to-have tools that do something special. My all time favorite is ProfCast from Humble Daisy.

BeboSoft? Humble Daisey? Are Mac developers creative, or what?

OK, how many one trick ponies do you have on your Mac? What are those special tools that do just a few things that nothing else does?

Share with other Mac users below in the Comments section.

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