When Apple replaced its aging QuickTime Player 7 with the newer QuickTime X, it touted the change as a ground-up rebuild to supplant the band-aided framework that had kept QuickTime 7 going for so many years. QuickTime may now be better poised to handle future media types and implementations, but since its announcement QuickTime X has not really done much, and has left many without obvious approaches for some of the basic controls that have been conveniences over the years.
One of these is the ability to play movie content at different rates than the default. If you have a high-framerate film, such as one that was shot at 60 or 120 frames per second, then playing it through QuickTime X it may default to 30 frames per second, having it run at 1/2 or 1/4 of the normal speed. To overcome this, you can still adjust the playback speed of your movie, though depending on the direction and precision you want, you may need to use script-based approaches for this solution.
Unfortunately Apple’s controls do not give you any way to specify a range at less than 1x, so if you want to slow your movie down you have to use an AppleScript-based approach, which can be done either in the Script Editor or in the Terminal. The script line that will do this for the foremost QuickTime document is the following:
tell application "QuickTime Player" to set rate of document 1 to 0.5
In this command, the 0.5 value will play the movie at half-rate, though you can specify any value. Negative values will run in reverse, and positive ones will run forward.
The back and forward controls in QuickTime adjust the speed from 1x on up.
Since this is a one-line script, you can easily run it from the Terminal as well, since AppleScript lines can be interpreted using the “osascript” command (note even though it may wrap here, all of this is on one line):
osascript -e 'tell application "QuickTime Player" to set rate of document 1 to 0.5'
Unfortunately this means you will need to use another program (Script Editor, or the Terminal, or perhaps Automator or even a compiled AppleScript Application using this code) to control your movie playback speed in QuickTime X, but technically it is doable.
That being said, this ability is present in other media players as it was in QuickTime 7, where you can use hotkeys or a slider control to set the playback speed natively. Therefore, while you can use the above approaches, if you truly need to manage playback speeds then either download Apple’s older QuickTime 7 player, or use a third-party option like VLC.
What is QuickTime X. I cannot find it in the latest Mac OS X 10.11.3 (15D21) El Capitan.
How to edit videos on the latest QuickTime Player 10.4? It was possible in older QuickTime Player 7.7.
QuickTime X was introduced with Snow Leopard and there was no version of QuickTime 8 or 9 that every saw the light of day, this means you’re running QTX on your current Mac.
QuickTime 10.4 in El Capitan does have speed of playback controls (up to 32X) using the l key. Tap the l key and playback speed will double. Tap it again and it goes to 4X. Again and it’s 8X, and on and on. You can even go in reverse with the j key and pause things with the k key.
QuickTimeKirk
Apple Support Communities
Thanks, but I did not mean playing back. I meant editing, like cutting fragments of a movie, etc. On the other hand, the name of QuickTime Player now is just that, no X involved. Saying QuickTime X to refer to the current version is misleading. Just a positive criticism.
it is possible to do Some editing, like dropping a Video or audio file directly onto another Movie. You can also do Show Clip, then Split ou Trim the Clip. Not as intuitive as before but ok. Some thing are still missing from the old version.
Well thank you for this updated info.
QuickTime is just one more peace of Apple abandonware. Although Apple provides a lot of free software with OS X, they don’t keep it all up very well. And, as with QuickTime X, when they do upgrade something, the new versions are often much weaker than the ones they replaced. They did this with iMovie many years ago and with FinalCut Pro more recently. They abandoned Aperture altogether; while the Photos app can do more than iPhoto, it’s no substitute for Aperture.
If you want dependable software support on the Mac, you often have to rely on third-party developers to meet your needs. That said, Apple provides an alternative to QuickTime for video editing—iMovie, which may be why they have done so little with QuickTime.