Sometimes we may need to join two or more videos into one. For example, you may have shot several video clips using your mobile phone or camcorder and need to merge them before you save or share it. In this quick guide, we will show you how to combine videos on Mac using various video players & editors. All of them are free and easy to use, excellent options for beginners.
Contents
- Method 1. Combine multiple videos using QuickTime Player
- Why can't open or merge videos using QuickTime?
- Method 2. Merge several video clips using LosslessCut
- Method 3. Join multiple videos for free with Avidemux
Method 1. Combine multiple videos using QuickTime Player
QuickTime Player is pre-installed on Mac. It is the default media player in Mac OS. Other than that, we can also find some basic video editing features with the free app. For instance, we can use it to merge several videos on Mac effortlessly.
Launch QuickTime Player on Mac, you will be prompted to select and open a video. Once you opened the video in QuickTime Player, click Edit > Add Clip to End…, then choose the second video and insert it after the first video clip in the QuickTime Player.
The player control bar will now turn into a container box where the video thumbnails are placed. You can drag the video thumbnails to re-order them.
Click File menu, choose Export As from the expanded menu list, then select target video resolution, 480p, 720p, 1080p or 4K, name the video file, choose a different directory if need, finally click the Save button to exported the merged video from QuickTime to your Mac.
Can’t open or merge videos using QuickTime?
QuickTime offers Mac users a quick and free way to join media files. It however only supports a limited set of file formats. For instance, you can not open, play or edit WMV, FLV, AVI, MKV files. Here we will also recommend two other free tools with more powerful video editing capabilities and support to more video formats.
Method 2. Merge several video clips using LosslessCut
LosslessCut is the swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing for Windows, Mac and Linux. Its free and open source. It is best known for lossless trimming / cutting of videos. Before we get started, you can download the video editor below.
Select and drag all video clips from Finder to LosslessCut to quickly import them. All added videos will be displayed in the Batch file list in the left panel.
You can drag the video clips to reorder them in the list. Then hit the Merge button above the list to get more options before you join them all together into one. For example, you can enable “Check compatibility”, preserve original metadata, select output video format/codec, set output file name, etc. Finally hit the Merge button to export all video clips and save them as one video file to your Mac.
Method 3. Join multiple videos for free with Avidemux
While LosslessCut is best known as lossless trimming or cutting of videos, Avidemux is popular for its great support to a variety of file types and automated tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting.
There are basically four steps to combine multiple video clips into one using this free video editor. Run Avidemux on your Mac, click File > Open to add the first video clip. Then click File > Append… to add the second video, repeat the steps to add more videos if like.
After that choose an output format and customize the video/audio output. Finally go to File > Save from the top menu bar, then select output folder, file name and save all video clips as one file to your Mac.