Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

QuickTime Player

A QuickTime movie is a video file you can play from your hard drive, a CD or DVD, or the Internet. Like any movie, it creates the illusion of motion by flashing many individual frames (photos) per second before your eyes, while also playing a synchronized soundtrack.

Thousands of Mac OS X programs can open QuickTime movies, play them back, and sometimes even incorporate them into documents. Among them: Word, FileMaker, Keynote, PowerPoint, Safari, and even the Finder (when you use Quick Look, column view, or Cover Flow view; see Chapter 1).

But the cornerstone of Mac OS X’s built-in movie-playback software is QuickTime Player, which sits in your Applications folder. In Snow Leopard, the name was accurate—it was just a player. But in Lion, QuickTime Player lets you edit videos as well. You can chop them up, rearrange the chunks, tack on new movies, and trim the ends. In fact, you can even record new video, either using your Mac’s built-in camera or by recording screen activity. Finally, when everything looks good, you can post your masterpiece to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, or another online site.

You can open a movie file by double-clicking it. When QuickTime Player first opens, you get a very cool, borderless playback window. Just hit the space bar to play the movie.

There’s a control toolbar at the bottom of the window (Figure 15-3), but it fades away after a few seconds—or immediately, if you move the cursor out of the frame. The toolbar reappears anytime your mouse ...