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Quicktime Player help:

With QuickTime Player you can quickly remove a portion of the beginning or end of a movie or a movie clip to make it shorter or remove unwanted content.

I want to remove the portion starting at 03:08 and ending at 03:49 of the movie, preferably through an applescript like the following:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    activate
    trim document 1 from 0 to (4 * 60 + 41.75)
end tell

Am pretty sure QT PRO can do it.

simpatico
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    Have you tried doing it in a little more of a round about way? Duplicate the movie, trim one copy to contain your start (00:00-03:08), trim the second to contain your end (03:49-end), and finally combine the two. – roosto Jan 18 '12 at 14:10
  • Is iMovie an option? If so, it should be easy enough to cut a clip out. – james.garriss Jan 18 '12 at 17:40
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    So, what's the question? Is it the one in the title, ie “How can I remove a portion of from the middle of a movie?”, or is it only an Applescript that you want? – MattiSG Jan 18 '12 at 21:22

4 Answers4

85

You can use Quicktime 10.x to split the movie into multiple clips, and then trim the individual clips. When you're done editing the individual clips and you save/export the movie, you get exactly what you want: one single, continuous movie, sans the parts you trimmed.

Split a movie into clips

  1. In QuickTime Player, drag the playhead (the small diamond) in the timeline to the location where you want to split your movie.

  2. Choose Edit > Split Clip.
    Your movie splits into two clips.

  3. To split one of the clips in two, select the clip, drag the playhead (now represented by a red vertical line) to the location where you want to split the clip, and then choose Edit > Split Clip.
    Your movie is now split into three clips.

  4. To continue splitting clips, repeat step three.

  5. When you’re done splitting clips, you can rearrange your clips or click Done.

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH5884

I haven't investigated it, but there may be an analogous AppleScript API for working with clips.

Community
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Matt Ball
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  • save/export the movie can these kind of splits be done without re-encoding?

     – pkamb Sep 16 '19 at 16:12
  • What Matt Ball said is the best way which I love to use. By going it interactively you'd better off out of quicktime player than by programming. For you can make as many splits as possible either by menu item "Split Clip" or by a shortcut "Command+Y". The flip side will be that it will grow in size when you made too many splits that is from my experience. – Sungwook Kim Sep 18 '19 at 09:19
  • It does not work I am getting decoding error @Matt Ball – alper Oct 06 '19 at 12:34
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    This is as logical as "the sign in the middle of the lake asking folks not to tie boats to the sign". Why not just "select" a portion of the video on the bottom strip.... right click... "Delete selection? – JasonGenX Apr 09 '22 at 00:22
10

Check the amazing video here, he explains how to use Cmd + Y to do the clipping from the middle portion. It's same as Matt's answer, but visually explianed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7NrlhZin4M

Pratik Khadloya
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2

You'll need the more advanced editing features of QuickTime 7. To install it on Snow Leopard or Lion, refer to Installing QuickTime Player 7 on Mac OS X v10.6 or Later on Apple's KB.

You'll then be able to open your video with QT7, select parts of your video with I (set input point) and O (set output point), and delete the part with a stroke of ⌫. Then, simply save the file, as said earlier.

You might need a license key for QT7, though (I don't remember if the latest versions of the OS need them or activate the Pro features for free).

(taken from my answer here, but it felt flaky linking to it when the question is not really the same)

Community
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MattiSG
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-1

If you want to get 3:08 to 3:49 you should use:

trim document 1 from (3*60 + 8) to (3*60 +49)
Nathan Greenstein
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Noah
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