Editing An MP4 Movie

[hughvane]

I hope I’m in the right forum, but this is to ask for advice and assistance in editing an MP4 movie.

It’s of a neighbour’s tall tree-felling event and filmed using a Canon camera. It replays well with Apple Quicktime and TV, but the actual drama of the tree falling is the final 30 seconds only. The file is ~576 Mb, far too large to be sent to interested parties via email.

Online advice keeps telling me how simple a matter it is to use this or that app, including Quicktime; plus various third-party applications, that, frankly, bewilder my old brain. In a past life I used QTPro, which is no longer.

I need to retain the original file, but wish to copy, save, then distribute the final 30 seconds of it only.

From your personal experience please, what is the recommended method? TIA.

 

[ferrarr]

you should be able to do that in iMovie. Trim and arrange videos and photos in iMovie - Apple Support

 

[MacInWin]

As for the preservation, make a copy first of the unedited file, then edit one of the copies, leaving the other untouched.

 

[hughvane]

Thank you both, and I'm using a backup for the experiment.

I think I've given iMovie a fair shot, but sorry to say that some of the terminology is meaningless to me.

Attached is a screenshot of the video in iMovie, and as can be seen, it is presented in sections. At the far Left of the image is a greyish vertical line, what I think is the so-called Timeline.

I want only the last two sections for redistribution, the previous ones can be deleted. How do I select the unwanted ones to do that?

PS. have either of you used Da Vinci Resolve?

 

[Slydude]

Have a look at the QuickTime Player app included with your OS. When QuickTime Pro was discontinued every version of QuickTime Player since then has had editing capabilities. The behavior is very similar to QuickTime Pro. Set the article below to your OS.

Trim a movie or clip in QuickTime Player on Mac

With QuickTime Player on Mac, you can remove or “trim” parts of a movie or a movie clip.

support.apple.com

BTW have you considered uploading the whole video to YouTube? There is a way to designate a video as having a private link. Videos with private links are not shown to YouTube users unless they have the link you provide them.

How to Share a Private YouTube Video

Get all the convenience of uploading to YouTube without making your video public!

www.howtogeek.com

That size video shouldn't take long to upload.

 

[MacBiter]

There's a free video editor - Shotcut - which will do this job for you. It looks a bit daunting at first but if you watch an introductory video (there are loads on YouTube) you can edit the file and save the result as an mp4. This won't affect the original file - once you've done the Export, just quit and if it asks you to save changes just click no.

Just think of it like Audacity but for video not audio.

 

[hughvane]

Have a look at the QuickTime Player app included with your OS.

Wonderful! That's done it, thank you, and I can now distribute a much-shortened version of the full movie.

 

[Slydude]

Wonderful! That's done it, thank you, and I can now distribute a much-shortened version of the full movie.

I'm glad that sorted things out for you.

When Apple dropped QuickTime Pro I was a bit disappointed because I used it for just this kind of thing. I don't remember how long it was before I ran across something demonstrating how to use QuickTime Player to do the same thing. I remember thinking that it's not obvious how to access/use those features.

The one thing that seems to be missing from QT Pro is the ability to add other codecs for formats it couldn't originally read/edit.

 

[MacBiter]

When Apple dropped QuickTime Pro I was a bit disappointed because I used it for just this kind of thing. I don't remember how long it was before I ran across something demonstrating how to use QuickTime Player to do the same thing. I remember thinking that it's not obvious how to access/use those features.

The one thing that seems to be missing from QT Pro is the ability to add other codecs for formats it couldn't originally read/edit.

I can still run QT Pro 7 by having it in Applications/Utilities - I have both in my Dock. However, I'm running Mavericks - it may not be possible in later systems.

As for other codecs, see my post above re Shotcut which can handle very many codecs.

 

[Slydude]

I can still run QT Pro 7 by having it in Applications/Utilities - I have both in my Dock. However, I'm running Mavericks - it may not be possible in later systems.

As for other codecs, see my post above re Shotcut which can handle very many codecs.

I ran QT Pro 7 that way for a while. It ran well until later OS versions stopped supporting 32-bit software.

macOS Catalina dropped support for all 32-bit applications, including the QTKit framework and the old QuickTime 7.

QuickTime - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[vansmith]

Have a look at the QuickTime Player app included with your OS. When QuickTime Pro was discontinued every version of QuickTime Player since then has had editing capabilities. The behavior is very similar to QuickTime Pro. Set the article below to your OS.

Trim a movie or clip in QuickTime Player on Mac

With QuickTime Player on Mac, you can remove or “trim” parts of a movie or a movie clip.

support.apple.com

BTW have you considered uploading the whole video to YouTube? There is a way to designate a video as having a private link. Videos with private links are not shown to YouTube users unless they have the link you provide them.

How to Share a Private YouTube Video

Get all the convenience of uploading to YouTube without making your video public!

www.howtogeek.com

That size video shouldn't take long to upload.

I really wish that there was more consistency in features across iOS/iPadOS and macOS here when it comes to features that were added. On my iPad, for instance, I can crop a video, something I can't do on my Mac.

And to add to Sly's final point, any cloud service could work as well here.

 

[Slydude]

I really wish that there was more consistency in features across iOS/iPadOS and macOS here when it comes to features that were added. On my iPad, for instance, I can crop a video, something I can't do on my Mac.

And to add to Sly's final point, any cloud service could work as well here.

I'm going to have to experiment with that, I haven't done video editing on the iPad so I wasn't aware that there were differences.

 

[MacBiter]

I really wish that there was more consistency in features across iOS/iPadOS and macOS here when it comes to features that were added. On my iPad, for instance, I can crop a video, something I can't do on my Mac.

And to add to Sly's final point, any cloud service could work as well here.

Yes, you can crop videos in Quicktime - it's something that's always been there, at least since QT7, maybe earlier?.

 

[vansmith]

As far as I know, you can trim a video but not crop it on a Mac, something you can do on an iOS or iPad OS device. Am I missing something that's buried in QT on macOS?

 

[MacBiter]

As far as I know, you can trim a video but not crop it on a Mac, something you can do on an iOS or iPad OS device. Am I missing something that's buried in QT on macOS?

When you say 'crop', do you mean trimming segments from the mid-video not just the beginning and/or end (which you CAN do in QT), or do you mean trimming the edges of the video frame to make it smaller (which you can't)?

 

[Slydude]

As far as I know, you can trim a video but not crop it on a Mac, something you can do on an iOS or iPad OS device. Am I missing something that's buried in QT on macOS?

I think I see the distinction that you are making Van. With a specific crop. tool one could select a segment of video and apply the crop function. that would essentially create a clip with the cropped segment in basically one move. As far as I can tell QT Player is missing that function on the Mac. I didn't realize that till I read your post.

As far as I can tell the effect of cropping a video in QT Player is a multi-step process that involves the following steps:
1. Open your video clip
2. Choose Trim (command T) in the Edit menu.
3. The clip is now outlined with handles at either end and the entire clip is highlighted in yellow. Move the handles on the box until the segment you want to keep is highlighted by the yellow box.
4. Click Trim

EDIT: I initially struggled with the trim command (especially making precise selections) so I started using the spit clip command to put a split where I wanted the new clip to start and another split at the end of the command.The next step is to delete the unwanted segments leaving behind the segment you want. Also a multi-step process.

The effect seems to be the same as a crop but takes more steps.

 

[MacBiter]

I think @vansmith is differentiating between 'trimming' and 'cropping'? I.e., with a trim you can remove one or more segments from the movie, but with a crop you can actually edit out the top/bottom/sides, as you can do with still pictures in Preview.

 

[Slydude]

I had not thought of that use for cropping. AFAIK there is no way to do that with QT Player. Perhaps Apple wants to make sure you use iMovie for that on a Mac.

 

[vansmith]

I should clarify. On iOS and iPadOS, you can actually crop the video like you could a picture distinct from trimming (which you can do on a Mac). This might visualise this best.

 

[Slydude]

When I first read the thread I was not distinguishing between cropping and trimming. And the rest of you were correctly making that distinction. I'm going to go sit in the dunce corner now as soon as I find where I put the dunce hat.

@vansmith As far as I know QT Player doesn't have a cropping tool. You'll have to resort to a dedicated video editor. Too bad. Such a.tool would be helpful.