The demise of QuickTime Player 7 left an opportunity for a company like Digital Heaven to jump in and publish a professional movie playing app. New today is Pro Player and it's been discounted from $29.99 to $19.99 for one week only.
Even though we have had many frustrating conversations with clients on the phone telling them how to flick the counter on QT Player 7 to show timecode, we miss it not being installed on new Macs. QuickTime Player 10 is clean and simple, but maybe too simple to fit into a professional environment.
Software Company Digital Heaven has released Pro Player, a custom movie playing application for OS X that offers a lot more features wrapped up in a smart grey UI.
We've know Martin Baker, the author of the program for many years and he sums the benefits up nicely:
"The goal of Pro Player is to deliver a superb experience for professional users, who commonly need more than the built-in OS X player can provide. Comprehensive control is the hallmark of a good player app, and Pro Player excels in this respect with some unique features. The industry-standard JKL keyboard control for variable speed is included, along with interactive jog and shuttle on the viewer area itself. The Jump Back command allows instant rewind (with a choice of timings), so it's easy to review a missed moment again.
A unique time-saving feature of Pro Player is the ability to view embedded alpha channels without having to open the movie in a full-blown graphics or editing application. Video, audio and timecode information for the current movie is always visible and the current timecode is shown in a large and clear display."
Beta testers have said good things about Pro Player too:
"Pro Player has been great for reviewing renders with precision and ease."
Paul Conigliaro, Motion Designer and Editor
"Pro Player allows me to send QuickTime files with embedded timecode to producers and they appreciate the nice big timecode number that they can reference. JKL control over playback makes it easy to locate specific areas that might be problematic such as flash frames, black frames or anything that might need blurring."
Shane Ross, Editor
Good news is that Pro Player will run on the new OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion as well as 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion. The app would normally cost $29.99, but is discounted down to $19.99 for a week. We think it's worth the money just to be able to check on alpha channels without having to load a movie back into FCP or a graphics app.