How to Speed Up a Video on Mac

The fastest way to speed up a video on Mac is to select the clip in an iMovie timeline, click the Speed button, and choose Fast from the Speed pop-up menu. Here's the full set of controls, how to speed up one section instead of the whole shot, and a better option for footage of someone talking.

Speed up a video on Mac with iMovie

Select the clip in the timeline and click the Speed button in the adjustments bar. The Speed pop-up menu offers Slow, Fast and Custom. Choosing Fast sets the clip to twice normal speed by default , 2x , and drops a small rabbit icon onto the clip so you can see at a glance which shots have been changed. Custom is there when 2x isn't the number you want.

The control that matters most for anything with a voice in it is Preserve Pitch. Playing audio faster raises its pitch as a side effect of the physics; the checkbox undoes that, keeping the speaker sounding like themselves at a higher rate. Leaving it off is how you get the chipmunk result.

Applying speed to a range, and smoothing the join

Speeding up a whole clip is a blunt instrument. Selecting a range inside the clip first is the more useful move: iMovie displays speed sliders above the selected range, so the change applies to that section only. Rush through the part where you're setting up the shot, drop back to normal speed exactly where the point lands.

Jumping between rates can look abrupt, and there's a control for that too. The Smooth checkbox eases the transition between speed sections rather than snapping between them. Two or three ranges on one clip, smoothed, is what separates a deliberate speed ramp from a video that just seems to be glitching.

A shorter video without changing the pace of the voice

Speeding up and shortening get confused constantly, and they aren't the same thing. If your goal is a shorter video rather than a faster-looking one, there's a lever that doesn't touch how anyone sounds: cutting the dead air.

Montaj has no speed control. It won't change the playback rate of a clip, and that stays iMovie's job. What it does is detect the silences in a talking clip and remove them in a single pass, so the runtime drops while the delivery stays exactly as recorded. On a rambling take that's often two or three minutes recovered without a single frame playing faster. It runs on your device, with nothing uploaded. If what you actually needed was to speed up a video on Mac , for a time-lapse, a screen recording, a process shot , iMovie's Fast setting is still the right answer.