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About Saving Movies

With QuickTime Player, you can create and edit movies, and then save them. When you choose File > Save As, you can save the movie as one of the following:

If you are concerned about free space on your hard disk and can be sure your source movies won't change location, you can save your movie as a reference movie; the media you copy and paste is stored as a space-saving pointer to that media, rather than being stored entirely inside your new movie file.

When you play a reference movie, QuickTime follows the pointers to access and play the other movies (or parts of movies). To determine whether a movie contains pointers to other data, choose Window > Show Movie Properties, select the movie at the top of the window, and click Resources. If the file containing the movie does not appear in the list, then the movie has pointers and is not self-contained. You can Command-click the small document icon at the top of the window to see the file that contains the movie.

The term "reference movie" is also used for the files you can create to intelligently deliver different-sized streams to different users depending on their connection speeds. For more information, see Creating Reference Movies to Optimize Web Playback.