Oct 6, 2017 - iMovie for Mac: Trim clips. Edits in which a clip's audio and video have different start or end points are called split edits. Alternative to Windows Snipping Tool for Mac OSX. Ask Question. Macworld magazine's senior editor Dan Frakes just posted a very good short video tutorial (with show transcript) about the screenshot features of Mac OS X. This includes how to use the Grab app from the Utilities folder.
You've probably faced the problem of cutting a part out of a video file you already have recorded. Whether it is some footage you recorded with your camcorder or some television show, you have a huge file and you want to capture just a little part of it. Here is some simple and efficient way to do it. VLC is a freeware, that means a free application.
It is known for its versatility. It can read virtually everything. Be it a video file of almost any format, a CD or DVD, a stream, even a videocamera connected to your computer, VLC can do it. VLC is not famous for its editing capabilities. However, for this task is of a surprising easiness. First, download and install the application. When you launch it, you get this window.
It is the playlist window. Drag and Drop your video file into this window. It will start playing automatically. Stop it, using the Space Bar of your keyboard. You can always use the menu commands or even the Keyboard Shortcuts for Start and Stop, but I find it a lot easier and quicker to hit the spacebar.
By the way, the spacebar is a common Start/Stop button for most applications using video or sound files. Preferences With your video stopped, go to the Preferences of the application that is under the VLC Menu. Choose the Input/Codecs Tab. There, Under 'Record Directory' you have to declare where on your disc the files will be saved. Hit 'Browse.'
And go to the place you choose. You can even create a new directory (folder) right within the dialog box.
Once you have your Preference fixed, hit 'Save' and close the Preferences window. It stays there forever, exept if you decide to change it.
So, you won't have to do this every next time. Restart playing your video, till you'll reach the beginning of the the part you want to keep. If this is far from the spot the cursor is at this moment, you can slide the PlayHead into the right position.
You can slide it back and forth, to the exact point. Stop the playback (spacebar). Get Ready to Record Next, you have to explain to VLC that you want it to record a portion of your video. Roll down the Playback Menu. In there, click to select 'Record'.
With this checked, all the playback will be re-recorded on disk.
I need to cut out parts of a video (+ the associated audio, of course) to make a short clip. For example, take 2 minutes from one location, 3 minutes from another part of the video, 30 seconds from another location and join it all together to form one single clip. The format of the input video is mp4 (H.264 encoding, AFAICR). Don't need very sophisticated merges or transitions from one part to the next, or sophisticated banners (text) on-screen, but some ability to do so would be a plus point. I've done this with iMovie in the past, but where the original file was under 5MB/min of play time, the chopped-up version was over 11MB/min of play time, which to me seems really bad. Is there a better/different way of doing this on OS X? Looking for free (gratis) solutions.
OS: OS X 10.9.3. I ended up using ffmpeg from the command-line to do the needful clipping. After doing some research on this site and trying a few simpler commands I came up with the following command: ffmpeg -ss 00:01:00 -i input.mp4 -ss 00:02:00 -c copy -to 00:05:10 output.mp4 As I understand it, with this command ffmpeg basically copies a portion of the clip from input.mp4 to output.mp4 (no re-encoding).
Ffmpeg seeks fast to the 1 min mark (the first -ss 00:01:00), then starts looking for key frames, and outputs a clip from 3 mins into the clip (given by the second -ss option) to 6 mins & 10 secs into the clip (specified by -to 00:05:10). So this outputs a 3 min 10 sec long clip (5:10 - 2:00). NOTE: times given by the 2nd -ss option and the -to option are relative to the time given by the first -ss option. To learn more about these and other options see the excellent answers to the question. This method was surprisingly fast (10-15 secs) but for the first 2-3 seconds of the clip the sound would be fine but without any correponding video. Both sound and video quality seemed indistinguishable from the original after those initial 2-3 seconds. Dropping the -c copy part solved that problem too.
Free Video Clipping Tool
This does mean that video will be re-encoded — which takes longer (my late-2011 13' MacBook Pro took 80-90% of the runtime of the clip) — but audio and video quality were superb and file size was smaller than the original (calculated in terms of MB/min of playback)! So the final command I settled on was: ffmpeg -ss 00:01:00 -i input.mp4 -ss 00:02:00 -to 00:05:10 -strict -2 output.mp4 The -strict -2 part was added to the command based on suggestion from ffmpeg, as support for X.264 encoding is still experimental, To use ffmpeg I downloaded the pre-compiled ffmpeg from, put it in a directory that I already knew to be on my PATH and was ready to go!
Video Clipping For Mac Mac
Quicktime's Split and Trim functions can be used to quickly pare a video clip down to size. If all segments are from the same file, Quicktime can easily be used to split, re-arrange, and trim clips: Open the original in Quicktime, cue ahead at least one frame to the spot of your first cut, and under the Edit menu, Split Clip will be un-greyed. Cmd-Y is the shortcut. QTs control panel will switch to a clip-view mode, showing two additional clips with a division at the playhead's current spot, both clips highlighted in yellow. To delete an unwanted clip after a Split Clip operation, click on the clip in the timeline to highlight it, and hit Backspace, or select one of the functions commonly found under the Edit menu.
In the 'Clip View' mode, clips can be dragged and dropped to re-arrange their order. Once finished splitting clips, click the Done button on the right to resume normal QT operation. Moving on, it's now time to either Save the file in its current format, Export the file in a different resolution, or Share the file with one of the services. The latter two are under the File menu, but Save is conspicuously missing: No worries. Just click the edited clip's window red X in the upper left corner to close the window. This will bring up the familiar Save dialog box, and A/V files I've saved this way have kept all the properties of the original clip intact. Exporting or Sharing is more likely to cause the video to be resampled, and possibly grow in size as yours did.