QuickTime Player gains advanced features in Lion

The latest major release of QuickTime, named QuickTime Player X, was installed by default on Snow Leopard. It lost a lot of advanced features from the previous release, QuickTime 7. With Lion, a new version of QuickTime Player drops the “X” and gains a few more advanced features.

Editing video

There are three new features in QuickTime for Lion when it comes to editing videos. The first is the ability to merge clips together, which is a feature a lot of users missed in the first version of QuickTime X. If you have a clip already open, you can click and drag another video file onto it, and QuickTime will merge the two together. It will even automatically scale or crop the added clip so the videos’ dimensions match.

Another new feature is the ability to rotate a video clip if it’s upside-down or sideways. Under the Edit menu are four options: Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical. So not only can you rotate a video that’s the wrong way round, you can also flip a video. That’s useful if you use a built-in iSight camera to capture a video, since the iSight captures a mirror image.
The final new feature related to editing video is the Export Audio Only function. Found in the options once you click File > Export, this lets you save the audio from a video file out in AAC format, which can then be added to iTunes to sync with an iOS device, for example.

Screen recording

As well as new editing features, QuickTime has gained a couple of new abilities when creating a screen recording. The first of these is the ability to capture video from a chosen area of the screen, rather than having to record the entire screen and crop afterwards. When you click File > New Screen Recording, after you click the record button you’ll be prompted to either click to record the entire screen, or drag a selection to record a part of the screen.

The other new feature is the ability to have mouse clicks show up in the recorded video. When starting a new screen recording, under the drop down menu next to the record button is an option called “Show Mouse Clicks in Recording.” If you select that, any time you click the mouse during the recording, a black circle will appear around the cursor in the video.

QuickTime Player still doesn’t quite have all the features that QuickTime 7 Pro had (like the ability to open image sequences), but it’s gotten a bit closer with the addition of these new features. What are you still missing from the old version?