How to Split a Video on Mac

The fastest way to split a video on Mac is to open it in QuickTime Player, choose View > Show Clips, park the playhead on the cut point, and press Command-Y. Here's the full sequence, how to remove a passage from the middle, and how to land the cut on the exact frame.

Split a video on Mac with QuickTime Player

Open the movie and choose View > Show Clips. Move the playhead , the red vertical line , to where the cut belongs, then choose Edit > Split Clip or press Command-Y. The movie becomes two clips. Repeat as many times as you need; there's no limit and each split is independent.

Getting the playhead onto the right frame is where the accuracy lives. The arrow keys move it a step at a time, which is far more controllable than dragging. Holding Option while pressing them jumps to a clip boundary instead of stepping. Useful once you already have several cuts and want to get to one of them without scrubbing past it three times.

When the pieces are right, click Done, then choose File > Save. If Save appears dimmed, click the red close button at the top left, give the clip a name, and save from that prompt.

Two splits and a delete: removing a passage from the middle

This is what most people actually mean by splitting. Trimming works inward from the edges of a clip, so it can shorten the start and the end but has no way to touch a passage in the middle.

Two splits solve it. Put the playhead just before the section you want gone and press Command-Y; put it just after and press Command-Y again. You now have three clips, and the middle one is the mistake, the tangent, or the courier at the door. Select it and delete it. The clips on either side close up, and what you save is a continuous movie with the passage removed.

The join it leaves is a hard cut with nothing between the two halves, which is worth listening to as well as watching. A cut in the middle of a breath sounds wrong even when the picture is fine.

Once a clip is in pieces, the pieces can stack

Montaj gives you the same operation on a real timeline, with one difference that matters: a split isn't only a way to remove something, it's a way to make room. Its timeline carries B-roll layers with split-screen, so the gap you opened up can hold a second image rather than just closing.

Those layers are placed by you, where you want them. You decide what goes over what, and when. Everything runs on your device, and there are 100 steps of undo behind the whole thing while you try arrangements. If you only need to split a video on Mac into two files, QuickTime Player is quicker and doesn't ask you to think about layers at all.