Trimming Videos in QuickTime Player
I recently created a 10.31GB video in macOS. I wanted to trim the .mov file using QuickTime Player Version 10.5 (1110.4.21). Unfortunately, the Trim… command in the Edit menu was disabled. I dug around with trim quicktime video – Search (bing.com) and enable trim quicktime – Search (bing.com) finding unhelpful articles like Trim a movie or clip in QuickTime Player on Mac – Apple Support and Quicktime 10 Won’t Allow Me To Trim An MP4 – Apple Community. The solution finally came from Trim QuickTime Video Mac & Solve QuickTime Can’t Trim Video (macxdvd.com):
- Close the .mov file in QuickTime or any other media players.
- Locate the .mov file in Finder and right click on it.
- Select the “Encode Selected Video Files” command. A popup is displayed prompting you to select encoding settings.
- Select the resolution (e.g. 1080p) and encode the video.
- The encoding process proceeds in the background with a new file created and whose size can be seen to be increasing with time by refreshing the Finder window.
I opened Activity Monitor to see which processes were involved. avconvert was the top one. So apparently, I could have done this from the command line myself!
avconvert -s myvideo.mov -o trimmedVideo.mov -p Preset1920x1080 --start 0 --duration 5827 --disableMetadataFilterThis command takes about 42 minutes to trim my video on my M1.