3 QuickTime Tips to Easily Perform Advanced Video Editing

If you have a Mac, chances are you are familiar with QuickTime, Apple’s excellent video player that comes pre-installed on OS X. However, what you might not know, is that beneath that video player lies one of the easiest to use

video editors

that, while extremely limited in variety, does what little it can do extremely well.

Let’s take a look at a few tips that show you exactly how to get the most out of these editing features.

Combining Movie Clips Using QuickTime

Ever wondered what to do with all those 10-second video clips that you shot with your iPhone? Well, using QuickTime on your Mac you can create your own home video quite easily by just merging those clips.

To do it, open any video in QuickTime. Then, all you have to do is simply drag and drop any other video clip that you want to the QuickTime window and it will be seamlessly joined together with the original video to form a separate, new movie.

Even better: You can drag and drop as many video clips as you like and drag them around to change their position as well.

Once your new masterpiece is ready, click on Done then save your video in your preferred format.

Cool tip: While adding video clips to your new movie, you can also trim them to have your new movie show exactly what you want.

Create Your Own Movie (Or Screen Recording) On the Spot

Did you know that you can create movies right on your Mac using QuickTime? The great thing about this is that all you need to do is open QuickTime’s File menu and choose the kind of recording you want to create right there.

In fact, one of QuickTime’s least-known features is that not only you can create movie and audio recordings with it, but you can also record your entire screen or part of it.

Screen recording on QuickTime works just as you expect: Just click the Record button and then click on the screen to record all of it or click and drag your pointer to select only a segment of your screen for recording.

You can also choose the quality of the video recording, add your own voice by also recording from your Mac’s microphone and even choose to show your mouse clicks when recording. Pretty neat.

Trim and Export QuickTime Audio

Let’s say you have a video of someone giving a speech. Unless you listen carefully to what is being said it is not easy to know exactly where a certain part of the speech is. In similar fashion, it is difficult to tell where exactly you are in any video where the frames remain almost the same.

For these situations, QuickTime sports very handy feature that allows you to browse and trim just your video’s audio. What makes this feature way cooler is that you can actually see the waveforms of your video’s audio so you can tell at a glance which segments of the video are quiet and which have strong sounds.

To do this just head to Edit > Trim… and then go to View > Show Audio Track.

Once you find the segment you want using the audio of your video, you can skip to that point or simply trim it.

Then, if you would like to export only the audio, click on File, then on Export and finally, choose Audio Only from the drop-down menu on the dialog box that pops-up.

That’s it for today. Use these QuickTime editing tips to create your next piece or art or to just play around with your videos. Enjoy and share any other QuickTime tips that you might know about.