Crisp › How-to

How-to guides

Forty-six short guides for the things people actually need doing to a video on a Mac. Each one names the setting that matters and says what it costs you, rather than listing every control on the screen.

Two things are true of all of them. Everything happens on your own machine, so nothing is uploaded and nothing needs an account. And where a step is destructive — where doing it early makes a later step worse — the guide says so, because the order you work in matters more than the tool you pick.

Rescue a bad recording

Footage that is soft, shaky, noisy or combed. Start here if the problem is with the picture itself rather than with the format or the edit.

Change the format

Same footage, different container, size or resolution. These are the jobs where the answer is usually one setting and a wait, and where the wrong setting quietly costs you quality.

Cut and arrange

Turning a long recording into something worth watching — trimming, re-timing, and putting several clips together.

Give it a look

Colour, grain, borders and text. Applied last, once the picture underneath is already right.

Fix the sound

Audio problems are the ones viewers forgive least, and most of them are fixable without touching the picture.

Everything else

Odds and ends that do not fit the groups above.