How To Combine Videos On Your Mac

If you need to merge two or more videos into one file, you don't need to do it in iMovie or another video editing app. You can just use QuickTime Player to quickly create a new video file from the original clips.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Let me show you how to easily combine two or more videos on your Mac. 
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Now you may find that sometimes you want to take two videos and combine them into one. Have one play right after the other but they are both part of the same video in the same file. You can do that using an app like iMovie or Final Cut Pro but you have to create an entire project then add both videos and then export them out. There's an easier way to do it using Quick Time Player on your Mac that doesn't create any excess  files.
So here I have some videos and let's combine two of them. Now by default Quick Time Player should be the app that opens when you double click on a video. If it isn't you can always just run Quick Time Player and then open the file from Quick Time Player or drag and drop the file onto Quick Time Player to open it. Here I've got the first video. I'm going to shrink the window down here a bit and you could see that it is looking at that first file right now Desert 1.mp4. I want to add Desert 2.mob to the end of this video and save it out as a new file. Now I don't have to worry about creating a new document because Quick Time Player is going to do that automatically for me. Now there's an easier way to do this and I'll show you in a minute. But to start we're going to go to Edit and then Add Clip to End. It's as easy as that. Then you can select the next file. I'll just drag and drop it here into the open file dialogue so it's automatically selected. Nice and easy. I'll click Choose Media and now you'll see I enter the editing mode inside of Quick Time Player and it shows me clearly that there's one video here and another video after it. So it has combined the two of them. I can click and drag this red line here and go through the video and see where it goes from one to the other. 
But notice, the top here, it changed the file name from Desert 1.mp4 to Untitled. It automatically created a new document with these two videos in it. So I don't have to worry about whether this will change the original file or not. It won't. It will automatically create a new document. Now when I go to Save you'll find that you can't. 
File, Save is grayed out. The reason for that is this a composite document.This basically has links to two different video files. So saving it doesn't make sense. What makes sense is to Export it. You can Export As various different video sizes. Now, of course, you can only Export at the resolution of the videos it has in it. So in this case both were 1080 p so it's only going to let me export it at 1080p. No sense exporting at something with a higher resolution because that resolution doesn't exist in either video. So I'm going to select 1080p and now I can Save this out. Note that I can select the format here. Either the standard H264 which will play on a wide variety of different devices including older Macs and PCs or the new better HEVC format which will create a smaller file size while maintaining quality. I'm going to use HEVC in this case and I'll Save it out and it will give me the progress here as it renders out a new video from the combination of these two. 
So here I've got my new video. Let's close this Untitled document here. Notice when I close it, even if I hadn't exported it out, it's going to prompt me to actually Export it at this point with the same options. So I don't need to do that since I already did it. If I double click on this one to open it up you could see I have both videos in here. If i go into Editing mode hitting Command T you'll see it's just one long video now. It doesn't show us two different segments. 
Now you can make this even easier with drag and drop. So I'm going to open up this first video here. Let's shrink it down and if i simply drag this second video into it what happens is the editing interface opens up the bottom automatically. In fact I can select what size I want to add this to. I can add it to the beginning or the end. So I can add that in and I end up at the same state but with fewer steps. Now I can Export As right from here. As a matter of fact you can continue to add more videos. So I can drag and drop this one in and add it in-between or before or after these. Even once you've imported these in you can still select them and drag them around to change the order. Now note when you're doing this if you try to combine the videos that are using different aspect ratios like, for instance, this desert video here is 16 by 9, but this older video here of a waterfall is 4 by 3. So if I try to combine those, let's say open this and then let's bring this one in and I drop it in, what will happen is that the video will actually be enlarged so it fits horizontally so there are no black bars but you're going to loose some of the top and bottom. But if I do it the opposite way and I start with the video that's 4 by 3, then if I drag in another video that's 16 by 9 the video is actually shrunk horizontally so it's squeezed in and narrower than it should be. So it's not really even done properly. If you're going to go and combine two videos that are using different aspect ratios then you really need to do it in an app like iMovie or Final Cut Pro where you can control the cropping of each clip specifically to get the results that you want.
Now what about in Photos? If you have videos in Photos is there a way to merge two videos to get one in Photos. Sadly, the answer is no. You have to use the same technique here. Now while you can select a video and go to image and then Edit With and choose Quick Time Player it doesn't really work with this method because it's not going to allow you to merge two videos very easily that way. So what you're going to want to do is export the videos that you want. So I'll just drag and drop them here to the Desktop and they appear there. I'll do the same technique here. Open up one in Quick Time Player. I'll drag and drop the other one onto it. I'll then Export it and Save it out.Then I'll take that new video and add that back in to my Library and I'll get it as a new combined video there. If I really wanted to then I could then go and delete these two.
So it's not as quick or elegant if you want to do this with videos that you have in your Photos Library but you can still do it. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Combine Videos On Your Mac”

Fisher Glen

4 years ago

Can you add transitions between the clips?

Gary Rosenzweig

Fisher: No. you’ll need to use iMovie or another video editing app to do that.

Helpful thank you.

Tom Boyer

Will this technique work with Sony's AVCHD format? I bought an older Sony video camera that shoots only in AVCHD and I can't seem to break out the various video clips. This tip above seems real helpful for the videos I've made with my iPhone.

Tom: Can you open them with QuickTime Player? Try it, but I'm guessing not. If they can't be opened with QuickTime Player, then use something like VLC to convert them first. Or just use your iPhone to shoot video. It is probably better than an old Sony camera anyway.

Joyce Hann

Hi, is there a limit in QuickTime for how many clips can be added? I want to combine a number of files from converted 8 mm movies and burn a dvd for some older relatives. (Dvd is what they can manage and I kept my old MacBook to use its disc drive.)
Also, what formatting do I need to do to the resulting combined file to work with the old MacBook and create the dvd? I noticed that QuickTime makes a .mov.

Thanks!

Joyce: I don't think there is a limit. But it is easy enough to try it and see. But you may want to check with the software you are using to create DVDs to see if there is a way to simply do it in there. As for format, .mov is just a file extension. It does not define the format the video stored inside the file. But the DVD creation software has to convert the video to a special old format for DVDs anyway, so it is only important to the point that the DVD app can read the video. Beyond that it is all the same.

Comments Closed.

How To Combine Videos On Your Mac

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Combine Videos On Your Mac”

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