Easily Trimming Video Files With QuickTime Player

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use QuickTime Player to trim your videos.

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So if you've taken some videos and you want to trim a little off the beginning or the end or take out a section in the middle you can do that using the QuickTime Player. You don't have to go to a full fledged editing app like iMovie. So QuickTime Player should be the default app whenever you double click a video file on your Mac. Now it appears that really all you can do here is play the video. It is called QuickTime Player after all. But there are some editing features as well.

If you go to Edit, Trim you can enter a mode where you can trim video. Command T is the keyboard shortcut for this. When you go into this mode you see this strip here at the bottom with the yellow box surrounding it. You can click and drag the ends to trim off some from the beginning and the end. When you've got it just where you want it you can hit the Trim button and the beginning and the end will be gone and you just have this section in the middle. If your video is long dragging here is going to move pretty quickly and it's going to be hard to figure out exactly where you want to cut the video.

But if you click and hold and wait a second you can see that the area at the bottom expands and now you have finer control over this location. As soon as you release it snaps back. You can do the same thing with the beginning here. Click and hold and now you have finer control. When you hit Trim you're left with just the section in the middle. The section that was in the yellow box. 

Now one of the down sides of using QuickTime Player for anything is the Export options are very limited. You can only export as a standard video format. So you can't set specific export options and compression options. However when you trim like this and then you go to Save you'll be saving it using the exact same settings as the current video. In other words it's going to be lostless. It's just going to cut some off the beginning and the end but it's not going to change the format or compression or anything of the section that you keep. 

Undo works really well with this. Even though I've trimmed some if I hit Undo you can see I can go back to the full length of the video there. 

What if you don't want to trim some off of the beginning or the end but you want to take a section out of the middle. You could do that as well. In the normal playback mode here there's an option for Split Clip which is Command Y. So position the playback head where you want to make the first cut. Then you can use Split Clip, or Command Y. Now you go into this mode that's kind of like trimming. You've got this strip at the bottom and you can see the cut there. You also have a red line that you can click and drag to reposition where the next cut will be. So I'm going to make another cut right here and I'll do Command Y to make that cut. 

Now you can see I've got three sections. You can use these sections to actually move things around. So I can actually reorder the video like that. Or I can select the middle section and then hit Delete and it gets rid of it. So now I hit Done and you can see now I've got a total of 18 seconds of video where before there were 26. That middle section is now missing. You can use Undo on this as well to get back to the original 26 seconds. Actually those Split Clips are still there so you can continue to use Undo to get rid of those. Now you're back to the original video. 

When you do something like this, when you split a clip and then you remove a section from it, you loose the ability to save it. So you can't save it like you can with trimming. You have to then Export using one of the standard video formats which may not be a problem if you're already using a 1080p video and then exporting as 1080p video isn't going to be that much of a difference. 

So there's a lot you can do here in QuickTIme Player.  As a matter of fact not only can you trim and take out a middle section of a video but you can also insert other clips from other videos. So you can merge videos as well. 

I should add that you can also trim videos in the Photos app. So if you keep your videos in there you can go to a video and then you can hit the Edit button and then there's a little Settings button there with Trim as an option. If you go into that you're in the same Trim mode here. You can move the front and back. You can click and hold for more accurate precision there. Then you could hit Trim and it will trim the video. Then you hit Done. Now you have that trimmed video in your Photos library. You can also get it back by going to Edit and like everything else in Photos you can Revert to Original. So when you do that you'll end up back here with the video of the original length. So you're not permanently changing the video in Photos. You're just trimming it so now you're viewing a smaller section and also when you Export or Share you'll only be exporting or sharing that section.