Softimage .pic Codec for QuickTime
June 20th, 2006 by Luc-Eric - Viewed 9367 times - Popularity: 15% [?]Updated November 2009 for Quicktime 7 and Vista 64-bit
I have written a codec which allows QuickTime to read .pic files.
A few people have manually associated .pic files with the XSI flipbook or another viewer, but most people have them associated with the QuickTime Picture Viewer by default.
Installing this will not change your current file associations, but will allow the Picture Viewer to view .pic files when you double-click them instead of being greeted with an ”Unknown Format” error, caused by QuickTime thinking these are Apple PICT file.
It’s not necessary to have Softimage installed on the machine, this is completely self-contained
Content of the Package
- SoftimagePic.qtr
- SoftimagePic.qtx
- QuicktimeTestPic.pic
- Install.bat
Double-click Install.bat, which will copy the three other files to %ProgramFiles%\QuickTime\QTComponent, and will launch the Picture Viewer on QuicktimeTestPic.pic to verify the installation.
On Windows Vista and up with UAC, don’t forget to use Run As Administrator for the batch file, otherwise it won’t be able to copy the files.
I am not aware of any installation problem, but if somehow QuickTime isn’t finding the codec try to log out and back on to restart it.
Batch file hackers might be interested in seeing how I got the batch file to work from UNC drives, which isn’t supported by cmd.exe, or testing if the command prompt is 32-bit or 64-bit.
SoftimagePicCodecWIN1_2.zip (69k)
Preliminary OS X Version
Here is a Universal Binary port of this codec for OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
It will allow the QuickTime Player and other QuickTime-enabled apps to load Softimage .pic files. Unfortunately, this will not work in Preview or Finder previews as they by-pass QuickTime for .pic files and use an undocumented Core Image image mechanism instead. It is best to re-associate .pic files with the QuickTime player instead of Preview to allow easy double-click viewing of images. Please read the instructions contained in the installer.
The file contains a disk image with an installer which simply copies the component to /Library/QuickTime. A restart of the system is necessary at this time for the component to be detected.
Popularity: 15% [?]
thanks for this!
Nice one, thx.
hoo man thanks itīs great
i have installed but when i click on the .pic files rendered from xsi 5.11 i get the same error. I have not restared my workstation do i need to do that?
ok, you”re the first who can”t get it work – it’’s bound to happen eventually.
The first thing you need to check is if the tree files have been indeed been installed in C:\WINDOWS\system32\QuickTime. The only reason I could see needing to reboot is if there was a quicktime app constantly running in the background.
Try different pictures, maybe the .pic you tried were invalid. Started or aborted renders produce these small 4k .pic files that aren”t valid, and I don”t think this supports fields images (image.1.100.pic)
Hi,
I had a similar problem that the install script wouldn”t copy the files over. Be sure to check if your folder isn”t somewhere in a location that has spaces in the path, like the desktop.
If you move it to say “C:\temp\SoftImageCodecWin\” it will work.
Batchfiles don”t like pathnames with spaces too much ;-)
cheers for the codecs, very much appreciated.
rob
Great stuff!
Finally…I always prefered using software’’s native formats and QT is my favorite app for previewing everything…
Excellent idea
thnks
It succeeded in installation. Thank you for a great tool. Even if it is not QuickTimePro, practical use is fully possible. I want to introduce this tool also to my site (it is a Japanese site).
Does this plugin also load .pic sequences, not just individual .pic images?
it’’s quicktime that handles pic sequences, so this plug-in does allow loading .pic sequences with quicktime.
Thanks, Luc-Eric. This is a great plugin.
Hi Luc Eric!
Have you had any luck with your Plugin bundle? I”d like to create quicktime movie directly from our render through the Quicktime API (Actually I just build a tool to replace our previous pipeline and we are using it for everything but .PIC). If you don”t mind sharing the code I could have a look and try to see if I can figure out something.
Thanks,
Olivier
Olivier, I haven”t looked at this since posting the article. Are you really talking about an OS X version of this quicktime component, and if so which CPU and OS version?
Oops, sorry… Yes, I”d like to be able to load the .pic files from Quicktime on Mac OS X. I”m using all kinds of CPU, but my principal “burners” are still on Power PC G5 Cpus.. But from my experience, when one platform is working, it’’s only a few clics away from the other (PowerPC to Universal Bin..). As for the OS, I”m using the latest update of 10.4.7.
Thanks
No it’’s more complicated that this. Building a universal binary vs building an old-style binary that works for PowerPC only is two different version of both the compiler and the Quicktime SDK. It’’s They don”t work the same way – bundles are only for universal binaries, it’’s a directory structures. Old-style, it’’s a single binary with a resource fork. Also one of the XCode version broke the QT SDK (I think there was an update since). If you are at ease with OSX developement and creating resources ”thng”, I can indeed send you the Windows source – it will require studying and decifiering the ElectricImage sample in the QuicktimeSDK.
Thanks very much for this Luc-Eric.
The codec works on XP64 (32 bit Quicktime of course) but with a couple of minor issues. Through trial and error, I found that dropping your .qtr and .qtx files into the Program Files(x86)\Quicktime\QTSystem folder got it to work, except that when the image sequence first loads it shows a corrupted image. Hitting Play or just stepping one image fixes everything. Is there a different location where the codec files should be placed for XP 64?
[...] ail with a .pic attached and would have liked to be able to just click on it to see it? My Softimage .pic codec for QuickTime has been updated with a bug fix for an corrupted image issue reported by a few [...]
Can you please make a OSX version since at work we use Mac’’s for video editing/ compositing and most of the time they have to open up After Effects to just see my .pic renderings from XSI ;)
Hope you release it soon!
alright I’ve posted a preliminary OS X (10.4) version of the codec
Is it no available? I can’t get it.
Alright, I’ve re-uploaded the file, thanks