Fancy Playback Tricks

Playing one movie, start to finish, is kid stuff. Here’s what else QuickTime Player can do:

• Rotate or flip. The Edit menu contains commands for Rotate Right, Rotate Left, Flip Horizontal, and Flip Vertical. Those commands can be handy when a movie turns out to be flipped or rotated—or when you want to flip or rotate it for creative purposes.

• Change the screen size. As noted already, you can drag the window to any size using the edges as handles. But the View menu commands are handy, too.

  Actual size represents the movie on your screen at its real size—no larger. (If it’s truly huge, larger than your screen, then it may be scaled smaller to fit. But that’s a rarity.)

  Fit to Screen fills your screen without cropping or distorting; the menu bar and other windows remain visible.

  Fill Screen is especially satisfying, because it turns your entire monitor into a movie playback area.

  Panoramic squishes the outer edges of the video, distorting them slightly, so that nothing gets chopped off and the movie fills the screen. (These last two options are available only in Full Screen mode.)

Making the window larger may also make the movie coarser, because QuickTime Player simply enlarges every dot that was present in the original. Still, when you want to show a movie to a group of people more than a few feet back from the screen, these larger sizes are perfectly effective.

• Play more than one movie. You can open several movies at once and run them simultaneously. (Of course, the more movies you try to play at once, the jerkier the playback gets.)

• Loop the movie. When you choose View→Loop and then click Play, the movie repeats endlessly until you make it stop.

• Navigate chapters. A few movies, like the ones you buy or rent from Apple, come with built-in chapter markers, just like a DVD. They let you jump around in the film at your whim.

Editing Movies

QuickTime Player is also QuickTime Editor. The program doesn’t offer selection handles, so you might think there’s no way to select a portion of the middle of a movie (to chop it out, for example). But in fact, commands for trimming, splitting, and merging video clips let you perform just about any editing trick you can imagine. Read on.

• Trimming video from the ends. You can very easily trim dead space off the ends of a video. Figure 16-2 shows how.

  

  Figure 16-2. Top: To trim a video, choose Edit→Trim or press -T. Drag the yellow handles inward to isolate the chunk you want to preserve. (You can click or tap the space bar to check your work.) When everything looks good, click Trim or press Return.
  Bottom: If you choose View→Show Audio Track, then you can use the sound waves as a guide to your precision editing.

  You don’t have to worry about damaging the original video when trimming—you couldn’t modify the original if you tried. The instant you use the Trim command, QuickTime Player peels off the shortened version as a new, untitled movie, which you’ll have to name and save separately (choose File→Export As).

• Splitting a clip. Clips are subsections of a movie. To chop a movie in two, move the playhead to the spot where you want the movie to split, and then choose Edit→Split Clip. As shown in Figure 16-3, a clips map appears at the bottom of the window, showing the two resulting clips.

  

  Figure 16-3. The Split Clip command chops the video into two clips—and produces the map shown at bottom. If you click a clip and then press the space bar to play the video, you’ll see the red vertical line that represents the playhead. To chop one of your clips up into further subclips, move that red line into position and then use the Split Clip command again.

• Chopping video out of the middle. If you want to trim some video from the middle of a movie, first open up the clips map. Then split the movie as described above. Once you’ve split a movie into a couple of clips, you can double-click one of the clips to produce trim handles just for it. In this way, you can cut unwanted sections from the middle of a video.

  Or just split the clip into three chunks—and delete the middle one.

• Rearranging clips. Once you’ve chopped up a video into subclips using the Split Clip command, you can drag them around within the map. (If you don’t see the map, shown in Figure 16-3, then choose View→Show Clips.)

  You can use the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands in the Edit menu, too, to move chunks around—even among different movies. (Just remember to first split the target movie at the spot where you want to paste the new clip. The pasted material appears just after whatever clip is currently highlighted.)

• Combining movies. Combining clips, as described previously, is one way to merge videos together. But you can also merge entire movie files that are sitting in the Finder.

  Start by opening the first movie. If you want the second movie to appear at the end of it, just choose Edit→Add Clip to End.

  Tip

  If you press Option, the command says Add Clip to Beginning. Sneaky!

  The Open dialog box now appears. Find and double-click the clip you want to tack on. Repeat as necessary.

  You can also drag movie clips’ icons from the desktop right into a movie window. QuickTime Player adds them to the end of the existing movie.

  If you want the second movie to appear somewhere in the middle of the first movie, then open up the clip map (View→Show Clips). Click the clip that appears right before the spot where the new movie will go. Choose Edit→Insert Clip After Selection; in the resulting dialog box, find and double-click the movie file you want to bring in.

  Or drag a movie file from the Finder directly into the gap between two subclips.

Recording Movies with QuickTime Player

QuickTime Player does more than play movies; it can also record them. Yes, your Mac is now a camcorder, and a darned handy one; you can pop out quick video greetings, gross out your roommates, impress your coworkers with a dress rehearsal of your pitch, and so on.

Laptops and iMacs, of course, have a video camera built right in, above the screen. If you have another model, you can attach a webcam, an old iSight camera, or even a FireWire camcorder.

Then open QuickTime Player and choose File→New Movie Recording. The preview window appears. Use the pop-up menu shown in Figure 16-4 to specify what mike and camera you want to use (in the unlikely event that you have more than one) and what video quality you want.

Then, to record, click the red Record button (or press the space bar). Do your schtick. Press the space bar again to stop recording.

Your new video appears in its own playback window. Check it out, trim it if necessary, and then shoot it off to iTunes, Vimeo, YouTube, or whatever.

Figure 16-4. Use the pop-up menu to set up your flick; check the audio level (reflected by the dancing “VU-meter” bars at the bottom of the control bar); and choose a camera and mike.

Recording Screen Movies from the Mac

You can also record movies of the screen—either the Mac’s screen or an iPhone’s or iPad’s.

Why is it useful to capture screen activity as a video? Because you can make mini-tutorials for techno-clueless relatives. You can make video podcasts that show how to do things in your software programs. You can preserve web animations that you used to think you had no way to capture.

There are limitations. Your movies don’t include the Mac’s own sounds (game soundtracks and so on), so forget about capturing videos playing on YouTube. (It can record from the mike, though, so you can narrate what you’re doing.)

But who cares? It’s fantastically handy. And you can capture only a portion of the screen—one particular window, for example—instead of being stuck with the entire monitor’s worth.

To record the Mac’s screen, choose File→New Screen Recording. Use the pop-up menu on the resulting Screen Recording panel to turn the microphone on or off.

Finally, click the red Record button (or press Return), and then proceed as shown in Figure 16-5.

Figure 16-5. This message appears when you tap the Record button. If you just click to start recording, you’ll capture the entire monitor. But if you drag first, defining a rectangle, you’ll capture only that area.

Press Return, or click Start Recording, to begin the capture. When you finally click the Stop button in the menu bar, your finished movie appears in a regular playback window, ready to trim or to send away to your fans.

Recording Movies from an iPhone or iPad Screen

You can also use QuickTime Player to view and record your iPhone’s screen (or your iPad’s, or your iPod Touch’s). Yes, it’s incredibly useful to be able to capture videos of the iPhone/iPad screen activity. But this trick is equally handy when you want to project your iPhone/iPad demonstration for a large crowd, using the Mac as a go-between.

To begin, connect the i-gadget to the Mac with its white USB cable. Open QuickTime Player. Choose File→New Movie Recording.

In the recording palette shown in Figure 16-4, click ∨ to open the pop-up menu; choose the iPhone’s name (or the iPad’s). In just a moment, the live image of the i-gadget now appears on your Mac. You can use this arrangement to show your phone activity to a crowd on the Mac’s screen, or even click Record to record it as a movie.

Internet Streaming QuickTime

QuickTime Player also lets you view “Internet slideshows,” watch a couple of live TV stations, or listen to the radio—all as you work on your Mac.

Streaming Video from Your Browser

With ever-increasing frequency, websites advertise streaming video events, such as Apple keynote speeches and the occasional live rock concert. You’ll find a note on a web page, for example, that says, “Watch the live debate by clicking here on October 15 at 9:00 p.m. EST.”

If you do so, you’ll sometimes be able to watch it in your browser, and sometimes you’ll be transported once again into QuickTime Player, which connects to the appropriate Internet “station” and plays the video in its window. (You can also choose File→Open Location from within QuickTime Player to type in the web address.)

You don’t have much control when watching a live broadcast. You generally can’t rewind, and you certainly can’t fast-forward. You may be able to pause the broadcast, but when you unpause, you wind up at the current broadcast moment—not where you stopped.

Ways to Export Your Video

One of QuickTime Player’s most important talents is sharing a video: posting it directly to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, or your own website; converting it to the right format for an iPod, iPhone, or cellphone; stashing it in iTunes for easy transfer to your iPod/iPhone; handing it off to iMovie for further editing; saving it to the hard drive as a double-clickable movie; and so on.

Let us count the ways.

Post to YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Facebook

The Share button ( ) offers one-click commands for posting to YouTube (the world’s most popular and famous website for short videos), Vimeo (a less well-known, but classier, more high-def video-sharing site), Flickr (mainly a photo-sharing site, but it handles videos, too), or Facebook (the most visited website on earth).

All of these services require that you first sign up for a free account. You do that online, not in QuickTime Player.

Then, with your movie open in QuickTime Player, choose from the menu. You’re asked for your name and password for the service. If you turn on “Remember this password in my keychain,” then you won’t have to enter it the next time.

Finally, click Sign In. On the next screen (Figure 16-6), type a title and description for the movie. Enter keywords (search categories like “funny” or “sports”) so people on that service will find your video when they search.

Work through the remaining upload screens; click Share. In a few minutes, your video will be live for the whole world to see—no charge.

Figure 16-6. If you want to fit in with the rest of the YouTube community, be sure to misspell a lot of words, and never, ever put the apostrophe in the right place. Especially in the word “it’s.”

Controlling the Volume

Adjusting the volume of your Mac’s speakers couldn’t be easier: Tap the and keys on your keyboard. (The key next to them is the Mute button, which instantaneously cuts off all the Mac’s sound—a wonderful feature when you find yourself trying to use the Mac surreptitiously in a library or a church.)

Alternatively, you can use the menulet on your menu bar (Figure 16-7).

Figure 16-7. The tiny speaker silhouette in the upper-right corner of your screen turns into a volume slider when you click it. To make this sound menulet appear or disappear, open the Sound pane of System Preferences and use “Show volume in menu bar.”

The Output tab of the System Preferences→Sound pane, by the way, is designed to let you adjust the left-to-right balance of your stereo speakers, if you have them. The stereo speakers on most Macs that have them (iMacs, laptops) are already perfectly centered, so there’s little need to adjust this slider unless you generally list to one side in your chair. (You might find additional controls here if you have extra audio gear—an old iSub subwoofer system, for example.)

Alert Beeps and You

Alert beeps are the quacks, beeps, or trumpet blasts that say, “You can’t click here.” (Try typing letters into a dialog box where a program expects numbers, for example.)

Making the Recording

Once you’ve got your microphone situation taken care of, you need to get your hands on some sound-recording software—like QuickTime Player, which is in your Applications folder. (You can use GarageBand to record sound, too, but that’s often like using a pneumatic drill to get out a splinter.)

Choose File→New Audio Recording. Use the pop-up menu to specify the audio quality and sound source (Figure 16-8). Click the round, red Record button and begin to speak; click the square Stop button to finish up. Now you can use the volume slider and the button to listen to your masterpiece.

You can record video in QuickTime Player just as easily. See “Recording Movies with QuickTime Player”.

Figure 16-8. There’s a lot going on in this tiny window. The pop-up menu lets you choose audio quality and audio input. As you record, you see a VU meter (audio level) and an indication of the recording’s length and file size.