Trimming Your Video Clip in QuickTime

Here’s a quick tip that you might not be familiar with:

You can easily Trim up your video clips right inside of Quicktime.

Check out this quick video below to see how exactly it’s done:

(Video Source: How to Trim a Video Clip in QuickTime – PRO TIP)

Getting Started

First we have to open a video clip in our Finder, and the clip should automatically open up inside QuickTime.

Now, this is an interview video clip and as you can see bit of excess footage in the beginning where the camera is getting set up.

Quick Tips

Before moving onto the real subject, let’s take note of TWO things:

1. The name of the clip is called “Bob Cam 2.5”. Yeah, I keep it real when I name my clips!
2. The second thing I want you to take note of is the LENGTH of the clip.

Making the Clip Ready

So how can we fix this RIGHT inside of Quicktime?

Easy enough! Just hold down your CMD Key and press T on your keyboard, as in “Trim”.

This opens up the “Trimming Feature” that’s built directly into QuickTime.

These two yellow bands extending across the timeline represents the LENGTH of our video clip.

Now, all we have to do is Grab the Yellow handle at the very beginning and move it across the timeline until we see EXACTLY where we think the video should start.

Since you’re an intelligent person, I’m pretty sure you’ve already figured out that we can do this at the end of the clip as well, to take out that excess footage after the interview is over.

So we’ll just grab the yellow handle at the end.

Bring it inward just a little so the video clip ENDS right where Bob stops talking.

Good News:

Now we can simply press the TRIM Button on the right side to finalize our proceedings.

And now the clip has officially been Trimmed.

You might be wondering: “Hey Jon, if I save this clip as it is, and then I decide I wanted to leave that excess footage. Can I get it back?”

The answer is YES, Absolutely.

QuickTime’s Smartness…

You see Quicktime is very SMART; And it automatically assumes that we MAY need that excess footage later in future. So instead of wiping that footage away, it created a DUPLICATE COPY of our clip.

Notice how AFTER I hit the DONE button, what happened to the name of this clip?

Instead of BOB Cam 2.5, the name of the clip got changed to “(untitled)”.

In other words, when we TRIM our videos inside Quicktime, being SO SMART, it automatically makes a duplicate copy FOR YOU, so we can maintain the original length of the clip, in case we ever need it.

This means that when I close this new clip, Quicktime will ask me to give it a new name, so that it can save it without messing with the original file.

Quick Recap

So just to recap on this entire process:

1. We opened a clip inside of Quicktime.
2. Pressed CMD+T on our keyboard to activate the TRIM window.
3. Shorten up the excess footage at the beginning and at the end of our clip.
4. Then we pressed TRIM button over on the right to confirm our changes.

That is how you Trim a clip inside of Quicktime.

That is how you speed up your workflow when you need to make a simple change on a video clip.

And in our NEXT LESSON, I’m going to show you HOW to edit 2 clips TOGETHER right inside of Quicktime.

That’s it for now. I hope this helped you out.

If you have any questions regarding this method trimming your video clips, please leave a comment below!

We’re always here to help.

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