Mac OS – Cutting and Merging Video Without Downloading Software

In this article, we’ll cover how to cut and merge video on MacOS devices like the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac without downloading any extra software. Cutting and merging video on MacOS is much easier than you’d think.

Experienced Mac users probably already know this, but users who have just switched to MacOS, out of habits carried over from Windows, think they might need to download extra software to edit video. We sometimes see people searching Google for “an easy video cutting program for MacOS.” That’s why we wanted to introduce the video trimming and merging capability that already exists within MacOS.

Let’s get started with the example video shown in the Finder window above.

How to Simply Cut Video on MacOS

Just as Windows systems have Windows Media Player, MacOS systems have a program called QuickTime Player as their video player. Beyond just playing videos, we can use this program for tasks like simple video cutting, merging, and editing.

First, right-click the video file and select QuickTime Player from the OPEN WITH menu. If we don’t see this program in the menu, we can find it by clicking “OTHER” further down.

Then, once the video file opens on the screen, we click “EDIT” and then “TRIM” from the dynamic menu shown above.

As shown below, we’ll see a yellow bar over our video that can be dragged left and right, just like in apps such as Twitter or WhatsApp. Using this, we trim the video to the length we want and click the “TRIM” button.

When we want to close the video, clicking the red button in the top-left corner will ask whether a new file has been created and whether we want to save it. This is how we can save the new version of the video.

Merging Videos on MacOS Without Downloading Software

Let’s continue with the same video from our first example. We right-click the video file and select QuickTime Player from the “OPEN WITH” menu. Once the video opens, from the dynamic menu above, we go to “EDIT” first, and then “ADD CLIP TO END.”

A Finder window opens to select the new video to add to the end of our video. We select our second video and click “CHOOSE MEDIA.”

As you’ll see in the image below, the second video we added appears marked in yellow at the end of the first video. We click “DONE” to complete the process.

When we want to save our file or close the window, we’ll see a window like the one below. For whatever reason, our file can only be saved in .mov format. Let’s mention that as well.

In this article, we covered how to cut and merge video on MacOS X systems without downloading any software. Until we meet again in new articles.