Updated to clarify that a split clip feature exists in 10.7's version of QuickTime X. Say what you will about the framework and player introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 -- it's on multicore machines, it provides the, it lets you, all that good stuff. The fact is, for sheer Swiss Army utility it can't (yet) to the veteran. While you can use the v7 player on Snow Leopard and Lion, getting access to the Pro features. That's a shame, because it means many Mac users are missing out on most of the wonderful tricks QuickTime Player 7 can do to save you time and aggravation. Here's one example: splitting a long & large movie into segments for easier uploading or emailing. If you're running 10.7 Lion, you have access to; if you're running 10.6 as in the example below, you don't.
(I'll tackle the step-by-step of getting Lion's version of QT X to do this in a subsequent post.) In QuickTime X on 10.6, we've got a visual and very fast Trim tool; it shows exactly where the video will be truncated with an easy, iMovie-esque scrubber bar, and it does indeed save wicked fast once you trim your clip. Solar Fire Gold Demo there. Nice and handy. While you can trim quickly this way, you can't actually split the file into two and match up frames so you don't lose anything in the middle (which you can do on 10.7). You'd have to go back, open the original movie, and try to figure out exactly where you trimmed it -- QuickTime X for 10.6 doesn't have a way to do this gracefully. Good thing there's QuickTime Player 7 (in the Utilities folder, by default, on Snow Leopard) with a Pro license key. In this case, you just open the movie and use the selector tools (below the timeline) to highlight the first half of the movie that you want to save as a separate file.