How To Edit Videos In Mac Photos

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at a new feature of macOS Big Sur. The ability to edit videos inside of the Photos app.

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So when you upgrade to Big Sur you also get Photos version 6.0. One new feature of this is the ability to Edit videos just like you can with Photos. So let's look at this video right here. Now when I go to Edit it previously you could play the video and you could even trim a little off the beginning or the end. But these buttons here Adjust, Filters, and Crop, were grayed out. You couldn't use them with a video. This made sense because any change made to any one of these would have to be applied to every single frame of the video. For a video that was a few minutes long it would be like applying it to hundreds of photos at once. But now we can actually do that in Big Sur and Photos 6.0.

So let's start by using the Adjustment tools here. You can see the same tools that you get for adjusting a photo. So let's start by adjusting the light here. We can do that by just simply clicking and dragging this line. So I can make the entire thing brighter or darker. Notice that if I drag along you can see that the change that's applied across the entire video. I can also go down to more options here and adjust things directly. So let's Undo this change here to General light settings and just adjust the Exposure, for instance. We can do the same here with Color. So I can make a general color adjustment making everything more brilliant or fading out the colors. Or I can go to Options here and adjust things like Saturation or Cast separately. The same is true for most of these. You can't use Retouch or Red Eye Reduction but you can use all of the rest. So you've got Black and White, for instance, and I can convert this to black and white. Then adjust the look of the video. I can go to White Balance and adjust that. I can go to Curves or Levels and adjust those. I can even do Selective Color. So, for instance, if I wanted to make the blue sky stand out more I can click here on the Eye Dropper tool and select some blue. Then I could adjust the saturation of just the blues making that sky really stand out or bringing the saturation down to almost nothing. 

You can do this with any video. So for instance here in this one we can go into Edit and we can use anyone of these. Note that we also have the Magic Wand tool here which will try to adjust things automatically. So you can see this made adjustments to light, color, and white balance. You can use the Sharpen tool which you could see here if we were to zoom in on the table. Let's take a look here say at these vegetables and we can sharpen here and we can see how it changes. We can use this button here to see the original and the new version. Every single frame of the video will be sharpened like this. 

You could also just apply Filters. The same photo filters that you've got in Photos now work with videos. So I can go to Filters here and there's a small selection of them. So, for instance, if I wanted to switch to Vivid Warm you could see how it changes this and it changes it for the entire video. So when I hit Done here you can see the whole video now has that filter applied. You can also Crop the video here and then drag the corners just like you would if you were working with a photo. As a matter of fact you could use the Presets here. So if I wanted to go 16 x 9 ratio here I could adjust this, move this around, let's get the car there. I can even move the timeline here so I could see the position of things over the length of the video. So maybe I'll put this a little bit further over to the right here and down. Now I've got this whole video cropped.

Another pretty amazing thing you could do is rotate. So let's go into Edit here. Notice that this video suffers from you know the person holding the camera wasn't holding it perfectly horizontally. So everything is tilted a little bit. So if we go to Crop here you of course have this button here that will rotate 90 degrees so you can correct any video shot in the wrong orientation. But you also have the ability to adjust by degrees here. You even get lines there. So I can make this adjustment and get it something that's a little bit more horizontal. Here's a video that's shot on a tripod and the tripod wasn't level. So we can Edit this video here. Go to Crop and then adjust it to make it level like that. 

Now Photos handles videos just like it handles pictures. It always keeps the original around and just saves the settings to be able to reproduce the changes. So I could go into Edit here and revert to originals. So even though I've cropped this video and maybe applied other changes to it, the original is still saved there which is great for archiving. You always have your original version and then you just see the one with all the changes. If you want to go back to the original click Revert to Original and you get that back. You still have the ability to Trim like you did in Photos before so you can grab the end here and trim a little off the beginning. Trim a little off the end. You also have this little dot here. You can Control click at any spot and set Make Poster Frame to make a different frame, the poster frame that you see in your Library. 

Now when you click Done after trimming you get to choose between Save Video or Save As New Clip. Now if you save it as a New Clip it will just save the trimmed area as a new clip and leave the original. But if you click Save Video you would think that it permanently deletes the beginning and end there. But in fact if you go to Edit and then you use Revert to Original or simply adjust the trim points you can get the beginning and end of your video back. 

I should note that Photos is actually playing catchup here on the Mac because these new features were actually available in iOS 13 on the iPad and iPhone. But it's great to have these on the Mac now too. There's just a lot now that you could do in the Photos app without having to go and bring the video over to iMovie or Final Cut Pro.