QuickTime is a wonderful authoring tool, enabling webmasters to blend in video, flash, dynamically loaded content and to wrap it all in a cross-platform, configuration-detecting snippet of code. In fact, thanks to the (relatively) new QuickTime to JavaScript bridge, there is little that cannot be done within QuickTime when it comes to providing a rich interactive experience.

“Rich interactive experience” however often translates in an overload of banners, tips, logos and hotspots. This is especially true when one downloads a video from one of these big corporate sites that publish conference call reports, ad campaigns or industrial learning videos. Think: “Welcome to Ultra Mega Corp, Inc [Superimposed swooshy logo] this is your [queue in subtitle track] corporate safety training video [drop in a web enabled link for latest news] for North Building 1 [drop scaled up flash video of building map taken from the company website]”.

This is enough to make a QuickTime developer cry and our eyes bleed. Luckily, there are, most of the time, easy ways around this. When you open a movie within QuickTime Pro, be sure to give it a little Apple-J action, hence displaying its properties. With a bit of luck, you will see that the movie is split in multiple tracks, that were put together at montage time. Indeed, web links, flash tracks, audio and video can be kept perfectly separate in QuickTime and played back within the same movie, synchronically.

In fact, we often joke in the office here that we should write a big AppleScript to output QuickTime movies for us through an XML file — and laugh not, it is doable, something put to good use by the likes of Ultra Mega Corp who need to bake dozens of training videos cheaply.

Once your track selected in the Movie Properties window, just “Extract” it by clicking on the eponymous button located on the top left and save the resulting file. If necessary, you can even tweak color settings so as to compensate any washing out introduced by the removal of a layered track.

Save, export, enjoy!