Home > Advanced Editing
This page will describe the rest of editing commands.
SimpleMovieX uses the same concepts and interface as QuickTime Pro as far as editing is concerned.
Tutorials and User manuals available in Apple's website can be a good complement to this documentation.
Edit > Add to Movie
Edit > Add to Selection and Scale
Unlike Paste, which inserts a sequence inside a movie, the two Add commands keep the duration of existing movie unaltered.
For example, if you add a 10-second sound track to a 1-minute movie, the sound track plays for 10 seconds, starting at the position in the movie where you added the track.
Add command is used to add an audio track to a video, for example.
To “scale” a track so that it stretches or compresses to a particular length, drag the In and Out markers of the target movie to select the duration you want the new track to cover and then choose Edit > “Add to Selection and Scale”. Scaling audio may change the speed of the audio (although the pitch remains the same when you play the movie in QuickTime Player). You could add video to sound instead, and speed up or slow down the video to match the audio. You might have better results if you compare the timelines of the two tracks and cut from one or the other until they have the same duration.
Edit > Separate Tracks
A movie can have several tracks, like video and audio. This command creates a new movie for each individual track. The original movie remains unaltered.
Edit > Scale segment
Selected segment will be scaled to a different duration. For example, a 2 seconds video segment can be scaled to 10 seconds to give a slow-motion effect.
Duration of a picture in a slideshow can be modified, for example, to match an audio track added later.
File > New from Pasteboard
Create a new movie based on pasteboard. Pasteboard contains last cut or copied movie sequence, or a picture.
Text and picture insertion
To insert text, subtitles or caption in a movie, you will create a picture with the same size in pixels as the movie containing the text, and insert the picture. Future versions of SimpleMovieX may support editable subtitles.
SimpleMovieX always inserts pictures in the background. If you use the Add command, the picture will not be visible, as it will be behind the video track. Furthermore, transparency is not supported. Texts or pictures cannot be composited on top of a video track or on top of other pictures.
To insert a picture, open the picture with an image editing program or with Preview, select the area and do Copy.
If the image comes from a movie, you can just do Copy Still Image.
Go to SimpleMovieX, and use Paste.
(Other options: use Add to Movie, or use Add to Selection and Scale)
A dialog will pop-up, giving several layout options: Stretching or Keeping image ratio and add borders.
If image and movie have the same aspect ratio, both options will produce the same result.
See also Slideshow for an example of application.