How To Edit Videos In Mac Photos

MacOS Big Sur adds the ability for you to adjust, filter, crop, rotate and trim videos right in the Photos app, without needing to go to iMovie or Final Cut Pro. You can use the same editing techniques you use for photos, but applied to an entire video.

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Video Transcript: 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.

Comments: 14 Responses to “How To Edit Videos In Mac Photos”

Alan Graham

4 years ago

Many thanks, Gary—excellent as usual.
I'm having a problem with using Photos to edit recent videos taken with my new iPhone 12 Pro. The EDIT button in Photos is greyed out and I get this error message: "Unsupported Video Format: the full resolution video is unsupported". Other ".MOV" videos taken with my previous iPhone are fine. I checked my camera settings in Settings and these are "1080p HD at 30 fps" and the HDR Video is checked. Do I need to reset something here?
Thanks in anticipation.

Gary Rosenzweig

Alan: Which model of Mac do you have? Perhaps your hardware is too old and won't support editing the newer HEVC files created by your iPhone? You can always convert them first, or switch your iPhone's format to the old one.

Pshemek

Hi Gary, thank you, excellent explanation!
Is there a way in Photos 6.0 to edit only a portion of the video and not apply to the whole clip? If not which is the next best app (free or amateur level prices) to achieve it?

Thanks Gary. My iMac is 2015 and I’m sure you’re right that it’s showing it’s age - a good excuse to upgrade to a silicon iMac when it becomes available! In the meantime I’ll keep filming with the HEVC setting on my iPhone. I’ve discovered that if I right-click the video in Photos I can use ‘Open In’ and use QuickTime Player for basic editing in the short term. Thanks again.

Pshemek: So like apply a filter to a portion of the video? You can't do that in Photos. Use iMovie for things like that.

Dean Sherer

Gary, what a helpful video. I too could not edit videos in Photos 6.0 on my 2015 mac that were shot using HEVC. After exporting them from Quicktime in H.264 I was able to edit them in Photos. I then changed the video format to H.264 on my iPhone so I wouldn't have to constantly convert HVEC videos to edit them in Photos on the mac. I have been waiting a long time for the ability to straighten and crop videos for my iMovie projects. Glad Apple is now offering this feature!

Fred Dolan

How to merge two QuickTime videos using Big Sur? I followed the instructions and dropped both clips into the QuickTime video player. Error message is "The file isn't compatible with QuickTime Player".

Fred: You can still use QuickTime Player to do this. But first figure out what is going on with those files. Try opening each one in QuickTime Player normally. Is it one or both that won't open? If one, what type of file is it?

matt

Hey I watched a video that has some of the images digitally covered so you could not see what they were doing, how do you remove it so you can see what they don't want you to see?

Matt: Do you mean the area is blurred? If so, they aren't "covered" at all -- those are the pixels you are seeing in the image. There is no way to change those pixels back to what they were before the video was edited. All you have is those blurred pixels and no other information. You'll need to go back to the source of the video.

Ben

I seem to remember in older versions that a single frame from a video could be extracted as a JPEG. Was that feature removed?

Ben: The only way I know of to get a frame of a video like that is to choose Image, Edit With, then choose QuickTime Player, then go to the frame in QuickTime Player and Command+c to copy that frame of the video. Then paste it into an image editing app (Preview works if nothing else) to create a jpeg.

Paul

Shorter: click and enlarge video, click edit, select a frame underneath the video. But my questions is where the "Make poster frame" goes after you make it...????

Paul: It doesn't "go" anywhere. It assigns it as the poster frame to use. You are just choosing it. It is short for "Make THIS THE poster frame FOR THIS VIDEO." Like if someone would show you 7 hats they wanted to wear and you said "Make it this one."

Comments Closed.

How To Edit Videos In Mac Photos

Comments: 14 Responses to “How To Edit Videos In Mac Photos”

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