Did you know you can do simple editing with quicktime? Awww yeah baby:) Well, we’ve been getting calls and emails from great photographer friends of ours, who can now shoot video with their photography cameras, asking if they should get the full version of final cut or should they use avid? What we say in return is, “It depends on what you’re wanting to do.” If you’re doing something simple and fun, then just using quick time will be a great solution for video editing!

Ladies and gents, don’t freak out, we’re not using quicktime to edit your videos (well not all the time anyway) but if we did, you’d never be able to tell:)

When we went up to Indiana, a few days ago, we hung out with some of our crazy Indiana friends; and one of the first things they showed us was that their son had soaked up the “Pants on the Ground” song like a sponge! We didn’t even think twice about getting a camera and recording it…it was too perfect

Every time he sang the song, we’d laugh so hard, and say sing it again. He loved the attention and we loved hearing a 3 year old saying “looking like a fool with your pants on the ground.”

Below you’ll see that we have 5 movie files all put in a folder named “Pants on the Ground.”

Over the years, we’ve found that not only with video files but with every file on your computer, keeping everything organized and named properly makes life so much easier!

Now here’s where some of you will be haters, but Mac computers are the best and thats what we’ll be using for the rest of this tutorial! PC users…as long as you have quicktime 7 this can work for you too, but you should really get saved and use a Mac…just sayin:)

First thing you want to do is open up Quicktime 7

The first thing that will open up will be Quicktime’s huge page of advertising for apps movies, and tv shows. Before you think you should look around at this window, just close it:) Trust me, it took me 15 extra minutes to post this blog because I was checking out all the cool links quicktime shared! (Look at it on your own time..hahaha)

Now that you’ve closed that window, go up to file and select [OPEN FILE] and then select all of the movie files that you’re going to be editing! Now for most of you shooting on your fancy Canon or Nikons, more than likely when you open up your clips they’ll cover up the whole screen!

Just simply push “Apple” and the number “0″ and it will bring your clip to half the size. After you can see things again, organize your clips so that you can see all of them!

What we want to do is make it look like Little man sang the song all the way through without any issues:)

Now what we do is look throughout all the clips and find which clip he starts off singing the song the best. Keep in mind this is all subjective to what you think is the best.

Notice at the bottom of the clip there is a time line.

At the begining of the time line there is the play head and 2 “L” shape icons.

The two L shape icons are your in and out markers. This is key to putting together your video with quicktime! To set in points you push the “i” key on your keyboard. To set out points you push the “o” key on your keyboard.

So the first clip we want to use is from our 3rd clip from the very beginning to right after he sings the last “Pants on the Ground.” Our in and out points look like this now

Once we’ve set our in & out points you want to go up to [EDIT] and click [COPY]

After clicking copy you need to go to [FILE] and click [NEW PLAYER]
Notice we saved that player as [MASTER] by clicking [FILE] and then [SAVE]
Doing that just helps so you don’t get things confused

Now as long as you haven’t copied anything else, click on the Master quicktime player, and then go up to [FILE] and click [PASTE]

Now your Master Quick time player has a video in it

Aww yeah baby! So now you’ll notice your “in” point is at the beginning of the Master timeline, and the “out” point is at the very end of the clip. Go ahead and play your master clip and see if it’s playing the way you want to and stopping at the right place? If you’re satisfied, click the chapter forward button.

By clicking the chapter forward button, your play head goes to the end of the Master clip’s timeline!

Now, you want to go through and find a clip you’d like to go right after the clip you have up on your Master file.

And the cycle begins all over again. Set your “in” & “out” points, copy the clip, click on your master file, and paste!

And ladies and gents, here is a 14 second clip edited by using Quicktime:)