While the last major release of QuickTime (QuickTime X) came with the introduction of Snow Leopard, it appears that Apple has also significantly revamped the version of QuickTime included with Mac OS X Lion.
Rather than being called QuickTime X, Lion’s version drops the X from its title, and gains a few interesting new advanced features.
Video Editing Features
There are three major new video editing features in QuickTime on Lion. First, QuickTime for Lion adds the ability to merge multiple video clips together. If you have a clop open, you can simply drag another video file onto it, and they’ll be merged together. It’ll even auto-scale or crop the clip so the dimensions are the same.
Second, QuickTime for Lion now allows you to rotate a video clip that appears upside-down or sideways. The rotation feature is found under the edit menu, and allow you to rotate left, rotate right, flip horizontal, or flip vertical. The ability to flip a video around could come in handy for images recorded with a built-in iSight camera, as they capture video in mirror image.
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.
Finally, QuickTime for Lion brings a new “Export Audio Only” function, allowing you to easily seperate the audio from a video file, and separately save it to be synced in iTunes or distributed as audio.
ScreenCasting/Screen Recording Features
QuickTime has also gained some notable new abilities when it comes to screen recording. First, instead of only being able to capture the entire screen, you can now capture video only from a selected area of the screen. QuickTime now prompts you when beginning a screen recording to either select a section of the screen or record your entire screen.
Additionally, QuickTime now allows mouse clicks to show up in the recorded video. The option is presented when starting a new screen recording in the record button’s drop-down menu. By selecting this option, your mouse will be surrounded by a black circle that pulses whenever you click on something.
While QuickTime still doesn’t have all the same features that QuickTime 7 Pro once had, it has improved significantly. Are you still missing any features from QuickTime 7?
