Free and simple video trimming on OSX

It's been a long since I have need to edit and trim videos.  Tools these days are more powerful, easier to use, and sometimes they are just right there coming with your operating system.

In fact, I knew that I could do some simply trimming on QuickTime Player, and then use iMovie to combine these parts together.  So last night I spent time to do exactly that, and found the process simple to use.  Sure I wish I could get higher precision on selecting the starting point and the ending point, but I can always first get a rough cut to get 1 minute from an hour video, and then further trim that 1 minute to the exact starting point and endpoint point.

Another challenge of video editing is to find a simple but high quality way to convert video to a format that Quicktime native support first.  I tried 2 approaches:

• Use Air Video HD by first select the video on iPad, choose Convert, and set quality, thus having the conversion batch job created in the server queue.  It took about 40 minutes to convert an hour mkv file.
• Use Handbreak .

While so many people online praised Handbreak, I found Air Video HD much easier to use (since I used it to watch videos streamed from my desktop computer to my iPad already).  I found the quality great enough for my purpose.