05.09.08
Matt
You gotta speed it up
We’re in the middle of a little web site refresh here at Dusted and as part of this we are including some video on our site. No real problem there, but we came across a bit of a hurdle when it came to, what I believed was, a fairly simple video process. All we wanted to do was speed up the playback of the video to play at twice the speed.
I was expecting this to be as easy as, say, selecting a menu item such as “speed” in Quicktime Pro. But this wasn’t to be the case. We did finally manage to get the effect, but only by using Final Cut Pro. But this, to me, felt like one step to many. I searched and searched but the Internet had let me down. There seemed to be no answer to our little problem, however, I did manage to learn a little more about Quicktime Pro and came to a solution that feels too simple to have eluded me for so long.
- Open your video in Quicktime Pro
- Select all (Edit > Select all)
- Copy (Edit > Copy)
- Drag the “out” marker to halfway along (for twice the playback speed) – See the image below
- Now the key trick. You paste the entire movie into this reduced selection by selecting “Edit > Add to Selection & Scale”
- Trim to Selection (Edit > Trim to Selection)
- Export your movie
And there you have it. The entire movie will now play in half the time. The only downside is the lack of mathematical precision, but the time saved more than makes up for it. In addition, the movie seems crisper than the resulting movie created by FCP.
Dog photo courtesy of flickr user Amnemona
06.10.08
Ali Inhan
I was looking for an answer to saving a speeded-up sound file in Quicktime and found out your post. Interesting thing is, when you use this method for sound files the pasted sound adds rather than overlaps the original sound :) but good post. Greetings.
06.10.08
Matt
@Ali. Interesting. The clips we were using had no sound so we hadn’t considered that. However there is a way around it. Once you’ve copied the clip you can open up the Movie Properties (Window > Show Movie Properties) and select the audio track. Once selected click the “Delete” button. This will completely remove the audio from the clip. However when you then “Add to selection and scale” it re-instates the audio track with just the time-compressed version.
08.02.09
Steve
Hi Matt,
I had the same problem as Ali, so I tried your workaround for saving speeded-up audio, but I still get a pair of audio signals, just slightly out of sync with each other, but this time both are speeded up. I’ve tried various things, but no success. This is what I am doing….
1. Open your video in Quicktime Pro
2. Select all (Edit > Select all)
3. Copy (Edit > Copy)
4. Drag the “out” marker to halfway along (for twice the playback speed) – See the image below
4.1. Open up the Movie Properties (Window > Show Movie Properties) and select the audio track
4.2. Once selected click the “Delete” button (the virtual button on top of window, not the one on the keyboard) and close
the Movie Properties window
5. Now the key trick. You paste the entire movie into this reduced selection by selecting “Edit > Add to Selection & Scale”
6. Trim to Selection (Edit > Trim to Selection)
7. Export your movie
Am I doing something wrong?
08.02.09
Steve
By the way, if I listen to the left and right channels independently I hear both speeded-up signals in each ear.
09.02.09
Matt
@Steve
Firstly I would say that this method probably isn’t the best for video with an audio track. Quicktime doesn’t do a great job of speeding up audio. It simply clips and overlays the sound to fit rather than speed it up. Great for slightly speeding up (say 1.2 – 1.5 times faster) spoken word podcasts/audiobooks for instance, but not so great for a vastly speeded up clip (2 times as fast is probably too much for audio).
This clipping/overlapping of the audio is what I think you are describing. You may be better off taking the audio into an audio manipulation application, speeding it up in that and then pasting it back into the video.
28.05.09
Carlos
Brilliant! Thanks so much for this very useful info. = ]