PDFs and conversion

How to compress a video on a Mac

Updated 25 October 2026 · 3 min read

Shrink a video with QuickTime Player, Finder's encoder or iMovie, all free on a Mac, and how Orrel compresses, trims or makes a GIF from a right-click.

A minute of iPhone video or a long screen recording can be hundreds of megabytes, which is too much for email and slow to upload. A Mac can shrink it without any extra software. In every case the trade is the same: fewer pixels, and a little detail, for a smaller file.

QuickTime Player: lower the resolution

1. Open the video in QuickTime Player.
2. If you only need part of it, choose Edit › Trim (⌘T), drag the yellow handles and click Trim. Length matters as much as resolution.
3. Choose File › Export As and pick a smaller size: 1080p, 720p or 480p. For 1080p, choosing HEVC (Smaller File Size) helps further.
4. Name the copy and click Save.

The export is a .mov file. 720p is a sensible middle ground for anything watched on a laptop or phone.

Finder: several videos at once

Select the videos in Finder, Control-click and choose Services › Encode Selected Video Files. Pick an encoder setting such as H.264 up to 1280×720 or HEVC up to 1920×1080, and choose where to save. Each video gets a smaller .mov copy. The dialog can also delete the source files after encoding; leave that off until you have checked the copies.

iMovie: control over quality

iMovie is free from the App Store. Create a project, add the clip, then choose File › Share › File. Set Resolution, Quality (Low, Medium, High or Best) and Compress (Faster or Better Quality). iMovie shows the estimated file size as you change them, which helps when you are aiming at an upload limit. It is more steps than QuickTime, but it is the only built-in option with a quality setting separate from resolution.

In Terminal

macOS includes avconvert, which can compress from the command line:

avconvert --source clip.mov --preset Preset1280x720 --output "clip 720p.mp4" --progress

Size presets never enlarge a video that is already smaller. For finer control, ffmpeg (installed with brew install ffmpeg) lets you set the quality directly, for example ffmpeg -i clip.mov -c:v libx264 -crf 26 -c:a aac clip.mp4; a higher -crf number gives a smaller, softer file.

How Orrel does it

Control-click a video in Orrel, drop it on Orrel's Dock icon, or choose Orrel from Finder's Quick Actions, then choose Compress from the ring.

• Three settings. High (1080p, HEVC where the Mac supports it), Medium (720p) and Small (540p).
• Only kept if smaller. If the compressed copy is not smaller than the original, Orrel discards it and tells you, rather than leaving a useless file behind.
• Trim first. Trim keeps a start and end you set in seconds, without re-encoding where possible.
• Make a GIF. Turns the first 3, 5 or 10 seconds into a looping GIF 320, 480 or 640 pixels wide. Trim first if the part you want is later in the clip.
• Originals kept. Every result is a new file beside the original, named with "compressed" or "trimmed". MOV stays MOV; MP4 and M4V become MP4.

Screen recordings made with Orrel offer Compress, Trim and Make GIF as soon as you stop.

Where Orrel stops

Orrel's three settings are fixed sizes. There is no bitrate, frame-rate or target-size control, so it cannot promise a file under a particular limit; iMovie's size estimate or ffmpeg is better for that. It does not crop the picture, edit, add captions or join clips, and it reads only MOV, MP4 and M4V, not MKV or WebM. A video that is already efficiently encoded may not get smaller at all, and Orrel will say so.