Everything You Can Do With Video and Audio Files Without Launching an App

If you need to rotate, trim, extract a frame or text from a video or audio file on a Mac, you don't need to even open an app. You can do all of these things and more just using the Finder and macOS.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you everything you can do with video and audio files on your Mac without even needing to launch an app.
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Of course if you have a video file or an audio file on your Mac you can open it up in various different apps that handle that kind of file, even in Quick Time Player, and do lots of different things with it. You can also do a lot with these files without opening up any app. 
For instance, let's say you've got a video like this. If I were to double click it it would open in Quick Time Player and you can see there's a problem here. The video was filmed in Portrait Mode but you ended up with video that is rotated ninety degrees. You can correct that without even needing to go to an app. If you just bring up the Context Menu for this file, right or Control clicking it, two-finger clicking on a trackpad or right clicking on a mouse you can go to Quick Actions and one of the options you should have is Rotate Left. If you use that it will rotate the video and now when I double click it to open you can see it's rotated the right way.
Now you can get to those Quick Actions another way. If you go to View and then Show Preview, not only do you get a nice preview on the right but there is room for two Quick Action buttons. You can also click more here and Customize. This will determine whether or not these are even active. So you can see here I do have Rotate Left active and it's the first one so it is going to appear first here in the list. 
Now you can see here the next Quick Action button is Trim. You can, of course, get to it this way. If I use this I can Trim the video and you can see I'm still in the Finder here. I haven't launched an app. This is just built in macOS System functionality. Now I've got this view here and I can actually play the video. I can also grab the left end and the right end and trim the video to exactly where I want. I can Revert or click Done and it will perform the trim taking out the part before and after.
Now you can also play video right here in the Finder. One way to do it is to simply tap this Preview pane over here on the right and you can click there to Play. You can also, if you're in Icon View, see this video here and there's actually a Play button. You could Play the video and see a tiny little video player right there as the Icon. Now a better way to do this, especially if you're not using Icon View, is use Quick Look. So you can Control click and then choose Quick Look but the best way to get there is to simply select the file and press the Spacebar. This turns into a little video player. You can Pause. You can jump ahead and back. You can even choose Playback Speed here. You can jump into the Trimming Tool. You can Rotate here as well. 
Another thing you can do in Quick Look is you can get Text. So, notice here if I move my pointer over text while the video is Paused, I can select the text and then Command C to Copy it. I also have this little button here that I can click and it will show me where it finds text. Then it can Copy all the text.  
You can also use Quick Look to copy a frame from the video. So with the video Paused here I can two-finger click or right click on it and you can see I've got Copy Image. So I can copy it to the Clipboard or I can Share it right from here. Choosing Share does allow me to AirDrop this as a file or email it or send it in a message, even add this frame as a Photo in my Photos Library. 
Another thing you can do is if you clearly have a subject in the Photo notice that if I right click or two-finger click, I can Copy Subject and it will outline the subject there and I can copy just the subject with a transparent background behind.  I can also Share directly. So I can Share the subject right here to Messages, for instance, and you can see what I get. 
Also in Quick Look when you have the video Paused and there's something in the frame that can be identified, you'll see a little Info Button here. You can click and it can get info on what it found. 
Another thing you can do with a video that is not a Quick Action is to convert it. So if I want to convert this video here I can go into the Context Menu and not under Quick Actions but under Services there's Encode Selected Video Files. It brings up this little Control here. The controls itself are a little messed up but it works perfectly fine. You could choose from various different settings here for the type of video you want to Export. You can choose a destination or use the Same as source. You can choose whether this replaces that file. Then if you continue you'll just get a new version of this video and you can see it right here. 
Now for Audio files you can do a lot of this stuff too. So here I have a Wave File and notice I have the Trim option available here or under Quick Actions like that. So I can go in and I can trim the audio and I can play a little bit of it to hear it, get what I want and click Done. 
You can also Playback audio a variety of different ways. One is to use the Preview here on the right and you can see there's a little Play button in the middle of it. If I am in Icon View then I can actually Play the audio by just clicking on the icon. I can also use the Spacebar and go to Quick Look and you can see I get Playback controls here just like in a video, there's just nothing to show up here. 
You also get the ability to Convert Audio but only from certain formats to certain other formats. So for this Wave File here I can go to Services and there's Encode. From a Wave File I can Encode it one of four different ways. High Quality, iTunes Plus, Apple Lossless (which will be the highest quality), and Spoken Podcast which is going to be like the lowest quality. So if you really want to see what these do you need to select one and then set the destination (I'll set it to Not Delete). I'll continue. It's going to convert it. You can see it here saved as an mpg file, so m4a the extension but you can change it to mp4 if you wanted to. Then here you can see that this is 600K whereas the original was more than 21 megs. But you won't get the same options with other types of files like, for instance, with mp3 files you won't be able to encode it to anything. If I choose any encoder here it's going to give me an error. The same thing with mp4 file. Notice the mp3 file doesn't even give me the trimming option. Only the mpeg file and the Wave File do that. So you're kind of limited to what you can do. But if you have a bunch of files and this works for you, you can save a lot of time. 
You can even Batch Convert. So I've got two Wave Files here and if I were to go Services and Encode and then select something like, let's say, Spoken Podcast to make them smaller and then continue it's going to Convert both of those. 
One other thing you can do with audio and video files is you can get information on them without going into an app. So, with a video file like this selected I can choose File, and Get Info or Command i. Notice here under More Info you can Open and Close this section here. It's going to give me things like Dimensions, it's going to give me the Codec and various other information about the file. The same thing for audio files. You can see under More Info I can get things like Duration, Sample Rate, and such. 
Of course you can open up audio and video files in a variety of different apps, including Quick Time Player, which will allow you to do a lot more, and you can do things like, for instance, Share the files from the Finder to send them to somebody else over AirDrop or maybe Mail or Messages or maybe to add a video audio file to, say, Notes. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “Everything You Can Do With Video and Audio Files Without Launching an App”

Sheldon

9 months ago

Thanks bunches

Louise Kienast

8 months ago

Thanks for this jam-packed lesson of useful information! Time saving ways to get things done.

Esther

How cool!! I was listening to your Podcast yesterday and you made mention to copying subject, but I didn't know you can do it on videos in Finder!! The problem is REMEMBERING all these awesome tips!!!! Thanks for all the great great info!!!

Nathan

Hi, Thanks for this great video. Copy a frame from the video did not work for me, as well as Copy Subject and it will outline the subject. I have a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) and macOS Monterey
Version 12.5.1

Thanks,
Nathan

Gary Rosenzweig

Nathan: You are a few versions of macOS behind. Use the latest macOS to get these.

claudio

Thanks brother... very useful!

Tom Craig

Another information-dense video of quick actions that will save me lots of time! Thanks! Now to practice!