We’re in the middle of a little website 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.

  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
  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

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.