Basic QuickTime Movie Editing

As is usually the case if you want to use QuickTime for much more than a viewer, editing your QuickTime movies and tracks requires an update to QuickTime Pro. One of the first changes you may notice if you’ve upgraded to QuickTime Pro is that the play bar has two markers at the bottom — you use these to mark the beginning and end of a selection. Another change is that the Edit menu has added a slew of extra options, including the ability to Delete Tracks, Extract Tracks, and more. The Movie menu has added a Present Movie option so that you can have your QuickTime movie take over the whole screen.

The selection markers and additional Edit menu options give you the tools to do a significant amount of editing — either to create a new movie or to modify an existing movie. With these options you can add, eliminate, and rearrange scenes and then save the movie under the same or a new name.

Fine-tuning a selection

Of course, you can drag the selection triangles to the point where you want them. However, this sort of gross movement tends to make positioning on a particular frame of your movie somewhat difficult. Use the drag technique to get the triangle into the general vicinity of the frame, then click a selection triangle and press the Left- or Right-Arrow keys to move the selection triangle one frame in that direction or hold down the appropriate arrow key to move the selection triangle in that direction in slow motion.

Working with selections

After you’ve made your selection, you can play just the selection by choosing Movie Play Selection Only (z-T). You can even drag the picture from the movie screen to the Desktop or a Finder window to create a movie clipping — just double-click it to view the clip.

You can cut, copy, or clear the contents of a selection using the corresponding Edit menu commands or trim everything but the selection from the movie by choosing Edit Trim.

To paste a cut or copied selection in another location within your movie (or even in a different movie), position the playhead where you want the insertion to occur and choose Edit Paste (z-V). The pasted information appears, and the selection markers show you where it begins and ends.

Tip

A quick way to add a title or silent-movie style text block is to paste text in at the current frame. This inserts a two-second block of white text against a black background — QuickTime makes use of any font and style information that was with the text on the clipboard. This also works to insert still pictures. You can even drag text files directly to the QuickTime Player screen to get the two-second inserts.

These editing techniques work with all editable QuickTime movies — even sound files such as AIFF.

Note

Some media types, such as MPEG-1 files, which are playable in QuickTime Player, are not editable with these tools. If the movie is in one of these non-editable formats, all the Edit menu choices are disabled.