How to Trim a Video on Mac

The fastest way to trim a video on Mac is to open it in QuickTime Player, choose Edit > Trim (Command-T), drag the yellow handles in the trimming bar, and click Trim. Here's the full sequence, the frame-accurate version of it, and a way to do the same thing straight from the Finder.

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Trim a video on Mac with QuickTime Player

Open the clip and choose Edit > Trim, or press Command-T. A trimming bar appears below the video with a yellow selection stretched across it. The part inside the yellow handles is what survives. Everything outside them is what gets cut, which is the opposite of what a lot of people assume the first time.

Dragging a handle gets you close. Clicking and holding it gets you exact: hold a handle down and QuickTime Player shows the individual frames of the clip, so you can land on the frame where the sentence starts rather than a third of a second before it. Click Trim when the selection is right.

If you want to trim one clip inside a longer movie rather than the whole thing, choose View > Show Clips first and double-click the clip you want to work on. The same trimming bar appears, scoped to that clip.

Trimming from the Finder, without opening an app

You don't always need to open QuickTime Player. Select the video file in the Finder and choose Trim from the quick actions. The trimming bar appears in place, with the same yellow handles. Play auditions the result and Revert puts the handles back where they started if you've overshot.

The part worth knowing is what happens at the end. When you click Done, the Finder asks whether to replace the original file or create a new one. On a clip you might want back later, creating a new file costs nothing and saves the version you'd otherwise have overwritten.

Trimming is one move, not the whole edit

Montaj treats a trim as what it usually is: the first thing you do to a clip, on a real timeline where you can also reorder the pieces afterwards and keep working. That matters because the second trim is rarely at the edges. It's a pause in the middle, then another one, then a third, each one a separate cut in a sequence you're still shaping.

Everything runs on your device, so the footage never gets uploaded to do any of it. It's free today, with no watermark and no export limit. If all you needed was to trim a video on Mac and be done, QuickTime Player already did the job. This is for the clip that turns out to need more than one cut.