Posted on by OK, I confess. I’ve ignored QuickTime Player since it was first released as QuickTime Player X with the original release of macOS X. When the new version was compared to the features, power and flexibility in Quicktime Player 7 Pro, the new version failed just about everywhere. However, recently, I was exploring the menus in QuickTime Player and discovered that, over the years, Apple has added significant features that make it worth reconsidering – even for us QT 7 snobs. In fact, the new version can do many things that the old version couldn’t; though, to be truthful, the old version still wins in several areas. NOTE: When I say “new,” I mean the version of QuickTime Player shipped with the current version of the macOS. And, while the old version still has a few tricks up it’s sleeve, in the next OS upgrade or two, the old version is will stop working because it is only a 32-bit application.
Apple apps such as QuickTime Player, Photos, and Keynote work with many kinds of audio and video formats. Some apps prefer specific formats, but QuickTime movie files (.mov), most MPEG files (.mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.mp3,.mpg), some AVI and WAV files, and many other formats usually work in most apps without additional software.
So, change is coming. Also, more changes are coming with the upcoming release of macOS Mojave, which adds video editing capability to QuickLook. I’ll cover that when the new OS is released. RECORDING The new QuickTime Player can record your screen ( File New Screen Recording) or record a movie from an attached iPhone, iPad or the built-in camera on your Mac. To record a movie from your iDevice:. Connect your device to your Mac via a Lightning cable.
Open QuickTime Player. Choose File New Movie Recording. Choose Camera to record from the camera of your device. Choose the recording quality.
Both options record H.264 video. Thanks for the info Larry. I’m filming on a SonyA6300 in both 1080p and 4k. Some of the 4k files are huge. I preview all my videos in QuickTime before organising them into folders and then taking them into Premier Pro. I would like to trim them to make the files smaller and save space. However image quality is paramount for me.
Will trimming these.mp4 videos in QuickTime and then saving them reduce the quality in any way or will it be identical to the original in terms of quality? Also, I should have mentioned that I’m shooting in 24 30 60 and 120 fps and want to preserve that.
Will saving the video after trimming in quick time affect the frame rate or the quality? I don’t want to have to open Premiere Pro all the time which is why I’m asking despite the fact I know I could do it in there Thank you. George: There’s no free lunch. MP4 is, generally, already VERY compressed.
To trim a file means that you will save it again and, if you recompress into MP4, you will definitely damage image quality. The general rule is don’t re-compress an already compressed file. To trim files, your best option is to transcode the sections you need into something that doesn’t apply as much compression as MP4 – which means AVC-Ultra, or Apple ProRes 422 or other high-end formats.
This preserves image quality, but makes seriously bigger files, which was what you were trying to avoid in the first place. So, if you re-compress your files using the same codec and settings, image quality will suffer. If you re-compress using a higher quality codec, image quality will look great, but you’ll need more storage space. In all cases, recompressing will not change the frame rate. Finally, you won’t use Premiere for this, you’ll use Adobe Media Encoder for all trimming, transcoding and/or re-compressing.