Is there a way I can trim a video on QuickTime using code?

Yes, you can programmatically trim a video file to keep only the first part of it, such as the first 10%. This can be done using FFmpeg, a powerful multimedia processing tool. The advantage of using FFmpeg is that it’s generally faster and more efficient than manual editing, especially for large files. It’s also capable of processing the video without fully re-encoding it, which saves a lot of time.

To use FFmpeg, you’ll first need to install it if you haven’t already. It’s available for macOS and can be installed via Homebrew with the command brew install ffmpeg in the Terminal.

Once FFmpeg is installed, you can use it to trim your video. To keep only the first 10% of the video, you’ll first need to know the total duration of the video. You can get this information using FFmpeg or QuickTime.

Here’s a general approach to trim the video using FFmpeg:

1. Determine the total duration of the video.
2. Calculate 10% of this duration.
3. Use FFmpeg to trim the video to this length.

For instance, if your video is 2 hours long (7200 seconds), 10% of it would be 720 seconds. The FFmpeg command to trim the video would look like this:

bashCopy code
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -t 720 -c copy output.mp4


Here, input.mp4 is your original video file, 720 is the duration in seconds to which you want to trim the video, and output.mp4 is the trimmed output file. The -c copy option tells FFmpeg to copy the video and audio streams without re-encoding them, which is much faster.

This process should be significantly quicker than manually editing the video in QuickTime, especially for a large file. QuickTime might indeed take a long time to open and process such a large video file, depending on the specifications of your MacBook.