25 Things You Can Do With QuickTime Player

QUickTime Player is a lot more than just a simple video playback app. You can record video too, record and play audio, do some basic editing, grab frames, combine images and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you a lot of different things that you can do with QuickTime Player. 
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-So you may know QuickTime Player as the default app that plays when you double-click on a video file in the Finder. But QuickTime Player can do a lot more than just play videos. First, it can also play audio files. So I here I have an audio file. If I double-click on it it's going to open up the Default App, which is the Music App. But if I Control click on it and choose Open With I can choose QuickTime Player or of course I can just drag it onto the icon in the Applications Folder or in the Dock if you have QuickTime Player there. Then you can actually playback audio files, either music, spoken audio or whatever you've got, in QuickTime Player. You'll be able to use just about all the other tools I'm going to talk about here with audio as well as video. Notice here in this audio file I have the AirPlay icon and I can actually send the audio to another device like an Apple TV. The same is true here in video. I've got AirPlay and I can just use QuickTime Player as a way to airplay a video from my Mac to an Apple TV. 
-Now you can create new videos in QuickTime Player as well. Under File there are two video options. One is New Screen Recording. But that just takes you to the default screen recording options. But the other option here, New Movie Recording will actually use a camera attached to your Mac, like the webcam built into your MacBook, and you can choose the camera. You can choose the microphone and the quality and just record a quick video right into QuickTime Player and save it as a file. 
-Now you can also use QuickTime Player to record a new audio file. So just go to File, New Audio Recording and now you can choose microphone and quality and just make a quick audio recording. You can use this new audio recording and iMovie, Keynote, in any kind of project that takes audio files. In a minute here I'm going to talk about editing tools. You can use those editing tools for audio as well as for video. So you can record something and then go through and edit parts of it out, trim it, and such. 
-You can, of course, go to File, Open File and open a video file that way. But you can also choose Open Location. Open Location takes a URL. So if you happen to know the location on the internet of the video you can open it directly in QuickTime Player instead of using a web browser. 
-Another thing to do is open an image sequence. So you can go to a folder full of images, select All of the images, or actually just select the folder. Choose Media and it will give you some options here. Then you get a video made out of all the different images. This is useful if you're taking photos for stop-motion animation or if you've created an animation and exported it from a Graphics App as a series of images you can use QuickTime Player to stitch that together as a video.
-Now when you have a video open you can use QuickTime Player to export it in a different format. So go to Export As and you only have a few options. If the video is 4K or greater you can export as 4K. Otherwise only as great as the quality is right now. So you can use one of these different options here but you really don't get to choose much. You get to choose basically between H264 for a standard video and a newer format, HEVC, which will be smaller files and you can then use it on your Mac but older computers and things that don't have HEVC yet won't be able to play it. But it is useful if, say, you have a 4K video and you want to export it as a smaller, say, 720p video. You can also choose Audio Only to export just the audio track. Under Window you have Show Export Progress which will bring up a little window here. If you have a large file to export you can watch its progress here. 
-There's another export option under Share. You could see a bunch of different ways basic to Export and then share it in an app. But there's also YouTube. You can upload directly to YouTube from QuickTime Player. You have to log into your Goggle Account to do that, of course. Now I don't recommend doing this nor do I recommend using any  export to YouTube function in another app, like iMovie. Instead you should always export as a file and exactly the quality that you want. Test if out and then use the YouTube interface to upload. That gives you all of the different options. You're going to have to go there anyway to setup all the different options so you might as well use YouTube's preferred way to upload videos. 
-Now if you have some video that's the wrong orientation or mirrored you can go to Edit and Rotate Left of Right like that. You could also Flip horizontal or vertical. If you want to Trim video you can do that. Go to Edit and then Trim or just Command T. It brings up this interface here and you can trim a little off the beginning, trim a little off the end, Click Trim and now when you Save or Export you won't have that stuff at the beginning and end.
-You can also Split and remove areas. It's easiest to first go to View, Show Clips and then you get this interface here. You get this red line. You can drag that where you want. Under Edit you can Split or just Command Y and it will split right there. So now you have two parts and you can select one and, say, hit Delete to remove it. I won't go into too much detail about using this since I have a whole other video that talks about Editing in QuickTime Player. 
-You can also append a video to another one. So if I have this one open I can go Edit, Append to End. I can select another video, like this, and now you can see I've got the two clips basically combined into one video. You can also hold down the Option Key and this changes to Add Clip at the Beginning. If you already have multiple clips in here you can use this for Insert Clip After Selection or Before Selection if you hold the Option Key down. 
-Another thing you could do is you could go in and Remove the Audio or Remove the Video. So turn the video clip into Audio Only, say if there is music in it or get rid of the existing audio. Then you could use this to add new audio. So let me remove the audio from this, making this silent. Then what I'm going to do is go to here. Hold the Option Key, Add Clip to Beginning, and select this audio file. You can see it actually adds this next to it. So now I've got music playing instead of the audio that was there before. 
-If you want to watch video and have that window remain on top of everything else you are doing you can go to View and then Float on Top. So notice if I bring up a Finder window now it's underneath this window. No matter what I do I can't bring the window on top of it until I turn this off. 
-Another option you've got is Picture-In-Picture. Click there and now you've got it in the corner. You can grab an edge and shrink or enlarge it. You can drag it to another corner if you want and you can click here to Undo it. 
-Now you can control the playback speed here by clicking there, going to Playback Speed, and you can see I have a variety of different options to make it play slower or faster. Another way you can do it is by holding the Option Key down and clicking here and you could see it does it in 10% increments. The same thing here to go in reverse in 10% increments all the way to two and then it loops back to one. There's also a keyboard shortcut, Command and then Right Arrow will increase the speed. Command and the Left Arrow will go in Reverse. Spacebar Stops and Spacebar Continues at 1.0 speed. 
-You can also have the movie Pause and then use the Right and Left Arrow keys to advance or reverse one frame at a time. 
-If you have a Trackpad you can use two-fingers on the Trackpad and scrub to the right and left to move back and forth in the video. This works whether it is playing or not. On the Mouse you can do it one-finger, scrubbing back and forth on the surface of the Apple Mouse. 
-Another cool options is if you go to View, all the way at the bottom is Loop. Now the video will play and loop back to the beginning. So you can have a long video and have that just keep looping for you or, of course, this works for audio as well. So if you've got some white noise or a collection of background music or something you can have it basically loop over and over. 
-There are also options in View for Languages. So if the video has several language tracks you can select between them here and also subtitles. If there are subtitles imbedded in the video you can switch between them here. 
-You'll notice here that you've got Times to the left and right of the bar. If you click over here it will switch between showing you the amount of time remaining and the total time. So here it's 7 seconds in an 11 second video. Here it is 7 seconds with 4 seconds remaining.
-If you have multiple videos opened up at the same time in QuickTime Player you can start them both at the same time using Command Return. You can both start. Command Return will Pause them both at the same time as well. But any video you have opened you can go to Window and then Show Movie Inspector and get a ton of information about the video. You can expand each of the sections and it will show you the formats of everything inside the video, the actual size of the video here as opposed to the size of the window, like that.  The format it is in. All the little details you may need to know. 
-Now one useful function that seems to be missing here is the ability to export a frame of a video as an image. But, in fact, you can do it. Just go to the exact frame you want, maybe use the arrow keys to get exactly there, and just use Edit, Copy or Command C. Then go to any other app that accepts images and Paste it in there. Or you could go, say, to Preview and Preview has a handy file New From Clipboard. Now I've got an image of exactly what was in the Clipboard, which was the frame I copied from here. Now I can just Command S to save and save that out where I want.
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “25 Things You Can Do With QuickTime Player”

wProthero

2 years ago

Excellent. I hadn't realized how powerful Quicktime has gotten.

Kenneth Nellis

Our most frequent use of QuickTime Player is to display the iPhone screen image on the Mac. You connect the iPhone to the Mac with the lightning-USB cable and then in QTPlayer select File > New Movie Recording (⌥⌘N). In the dropdown menu to the right of the record button, select the iPhone.

Gary Rosenzweig

Kenneth: Why not just use AirPlay for that?

Claudio Silvaggi

thanks brother, very useful!

Stella Goddard

Thanks for this - really helpful

nick

Gary: if I recall correctly, in the past, when I exported videos in QT it created an .mp4 file which is pretty universal, now it's always .MOV which I'm not sure it would work if I send it to a Windows user. Is this even something to consider? thx

nick: Those are just file extensions. Change the file name to .mp4 and you'll see it usually works. Most formats inside .mov files generated by Mac apps are just mp4 videos. In those cases .mov and .mp4 are interchangeable.

Dave Taenzer

Very useful. I was not aware of many of those QuickTime features. Thanks.

In response, not sure AirPlay offers all the advantages of QuickTime Player, e.g. recording video from your iPhone, and displaying in a window instead of taking over your whole Mac screen. The latter makes it handy, e.g. in a Zoom session, to demonstrate iCloud syncking between iPhone and Mac.

Kenneth: Ah, you didn't mention you needed it to be in a window.

Mick

Thanks Gary. When I import a sequence of jpegs the playback speed of the resulting stitched video is very fast, even at half speed. Is there any way of slowing down the playback speed even further. Regards Mick

Mick: The idea is to use this as a way to stitch together images for stop motion animation. It sounds like you are maybe looking for more like a slideshow? Search here (at the top) for "slideshow" and you'll come up with many better options like using Photos, Keynote or iMovie.

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25 Things You Can Do With QuickTime Player

Comments: 12 Responses to “25 Things You Can Do With QuickTime Player”

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