Questions on QT Pro editing

Question

I am moving this from the iMovie discussions.
My son began a school project initially in iMovie but we had to give up because it was blowing tiny movies up into multi-gig files. Our best was we thought to do it in QuickTime Pro which would at least keep the file sizes reasonable.
We did finally succeed in finishing the project with some struggle, but next time we would like to do better and with less stress.
Problems we would like to resolve:
1. Text Titles We could not get them to position where we needed them. They covered the entire screen with black background, once we added a skin to the movie. We could not get line breaks except for those forced by the screen size. They also stuck to the top of the screen and we couldn't centre them vertically.
2. Graphic Titles Due to the problems above I created title graphics in Photoshop and saved them as .psd files to open in QuickTime. We could not find a method to make them last longer than 0.06 secs (the default on importing). I then made them into one-slide slide-shows and set the duration whilst doing "Open Image Sequence". This was not very flexible and left a white gap after each inserted graphic. I also noticed the color and contrast was being flattened in QT.
3. Deepetched Graphics I created the skin in Photoshop using transparency with drop shadow, then opened them in QT from .psd files. This worked but the feathered edges appeared grainy and not properly anti-aliased and the drop shadow was inferior to Photoshop's.
4. Resource Titles QuickTime seems to completely ignore the names of imported files, whether movie, text, graphics or audio, just giving them generic names in Movie Properties. Is there someway round this?
5. Timing & General Editing Is there some way to directly alter the timing of tracks without dragging the sliders, which are very crude. The same with editing. Can you step one frame at a time by keyboard shortcuts? Also it was impossible to edit at the very beginning and end of a QT movie, it seems to want a frame on both sides of the edit.
6. Video Tracks It seemed totally random whether QT considered an edited movie file, one or several tracks. Were we missing something? We would have liked QT to consolidate the video into one track so we could concentrate on the other editing.
We encountered all sorts of bugs and gotchas in what should by now be a mature piece of software. We were also struck by the primitive design of the work environment, it was difficult to believe it is Apple that has produced QT Pro 7. There was not much sign of thought having gone into any of the GUI.

Answer 1

I've answered some in the iMovie Discussion thread. Some more answers:
To edit a track name Open the Movie Properties window and double click the name. Enter a new name.
To "fine tune" any edits first turn on "Play All Frames" (mutes audio). Position the controller slider to a start point and use the right/left arrow keys to "step through" playback.
QuickTime files can contain up to 99 "tracks" which makes editing and adding a breeze (if you name the tracks first). To "consolidate" them into one track requires an export.
This is fine for most video formats but may cause problems for still image files or Flash tracks. A single 100 KB image file that is "on screen" for ten seconds would be exported at the frame rate used and would become 300 "new" frames (at 30 fps). This will balloon the file size of the final project.
To "add" a still image to a video you must first make a "selection". This means you must set in and out points based on the location of the controller. The letters i and o can be used to set the points. Use the arrow keys (while holding down the Shift key) to fine tune your selection.
To add choose "Add to Selection & Scale" from the Edit menu.
This will place your 100 KB image over any "time" you wish it to be displayed and it will still be only 100 KB.
One of my pages that uses still images and multiple video tracks and layers:
http://homepage.mac.com/kkirkster/03war/
Save it to your computer and start "taking it apart" using the Movie Properties window to extract tracks.
You'll learn version 7 Pro. Tips and tricks and a bit harder to find.