Playing and Editing Movies with QuickTime Player

QuickTime Player comes with any QuickTime installation. To download the latest version of QuickTime and QuickTime Player, or to upgrade to QuickTime Pro, visit the QuickTime site at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/.

To start QuickTime Player, you can double click the QuickTime Player icon, or drag a movie file onto QuickTime Player, or double click a movie that was created with QuickTime Player.

See also Stills or QuickTime from Videotape.

Controlling Movie Playback

You can move through a movie by using the Play/Pause buttons or the other controls such as the Step Frame buttons, accessed by opening the controls tray with the "button" button.

You can also use the spacebar on the keyboard to start and stop playback, and the arrow keys to step through single frames.

The black diamond indicator on the Time Slider can be dragged with the mouse to move rapidly through a movie.

To use QuickTime Player's editing features (below) you will have to become familiar with selecting portions of a movie (indicated by the grey portion of the Time Slider).

You can make a selection by holding down the Shift key and dragging the indicator along the Time Slider. Or drag the small triangles under the Time Siider to mark the in and out points of the selection.

Note: If a movie (such as a movie in DV format) is too large to fit on the screen or for the computer to play smoothly, try reducing it to Half Size in the Movie menu.

The On-line QuickTime Player Help command in the Help menu opens detailed documentation in a web browser.

Simple Editing Using the Menus

The Edit menu provides the tools you need to perform simple editing. Cut removes a selected portion from the movie and places it on the Clipboard where it can be pasted into the movie at a different point or pasted into a new movie. Copy does not remove the selected portion from the movie but also allows it to be pasted again. Paste places the selected portion ahead of the currently displayed frame. Clear simply removes the portion from the movie.

There are also several hidden editing features:

• If you hold down the Shift key while accessing the Edit menu, the Replace command is available. If you have selected a portion in the current movie, Replace puts a segment from the Clipboard into the selected area.
• If you hold down the Shift and Option keys while accessing the Edit menu, the Extract Tracks command is available. This is the key that allows you to work with Video and Audio tracks independently of each other. Remember that when you select a clip using the Time Slider, the information from all tracks is included in the selection. To select just a single track, you must use Extract Tracks to put the track into a new movie, and then you can copy and paste it to another movie.
• If you hold down the Option key while accessing the Edit menu, the Add command is available. Add is used to add a track to a movie, such as an additional sound track. In order to add a track it must first be extracted into a new single track movie using Extract Tracks from the Edit menu (see Working with Tracks below) and then copied with the Copy command. Position the slider at the point where you want the track to begin and then choose the Add command (also see below for Adding Scaled Tracks).
• Also if you hold down the Option key while accessing the Edit menu, the Trim command is available. Trim removes whatever is not selected.

The Get Info command in the Movie menu, reveals a window which provides a wide range of information about the movie and its tracks (including the ability to change audio levels). Its Time display is more accurate and useful than the display on the QuickTime Player window, and it can be left visible during editing.

Saving a Movie

Rather than simply "Save", use the Save As command under the File menu, to save a new copy of an edited movie in one of two ways:

Save normally (allowing dependencies) requires the least amount of time and disk space. But to play this type of saved movie you must also still have the original movies from which you copied the material. This is because QuickTime Player will only save the information about the edits that you have performed, without actually reproducing the segments into a "self-contained" movie. This may be most efficient for a movie that is temporary and does not need to be moved to another computer.

Make movie self-contained tells QuickTime Player to physically copy all of the edited segments into a single new movie, which takes longer and typically produces a much larger file size.

Give the new movie a new file name, select a folder, and click "Save".
 

Continue to Stills or QuickTime from Videotape.

See also QuickTime Tutorials at Apple.

Return to the FILM 410* Course Materials page.