Preferred Mac software to organize video files

[aperturemode]

I'm using Lightroom Classic on Mac to keep my video files organized mostly because it's somewhat convenient to use the same program I used to organize my photo files.

But there's little Lightroom Classic can do with the video file besides playing them and editing a few tags.

What software do you use to organize your video files on Mac? Are there any that can do some basic editing (cropping, rotating, etc), besides Mac Photos?

[wywh]

In macOS 13 Ventura I use:

QuickTime Player or Avidemux to losslessly trim movies. QuickTime Player, Quick Look or exiftool to losslessly rotate movies.

Final Cut Pro to lossy edit and export movies.

ffmpeg to losslessly change wrappers or other info (.mkv or .webm to .mp4, H.265 Codec ID hev1 to hvc1) and to lossy change codecs (VP8/VP9 to H.265 and Opus to AAC) so QuickTime Player and Photos can play them. yt-dlp for Youtube. Handbrake so I can give advice to people who do not want to use ffmpeg.

IINA and VLC to view QuickTime Player-incompatible movies.

GraphicConverter 12 and exiftool to edit metadata (date, location, description, keywords, title, author, rating) and to rename movies.

Photos.app and Google Photos for viewing and sharing.

...and occasionally in macOS 10.5.8 - 10.6.8 - 10.11.6 -10.14.6 and some old 32-bit apps like QuickTime Player 7.6.6 Pro, MPEG Streamclip 1.9.3b8, iMovie HD 6.0.3 to edit old .dv although DV seems to work also in current gear.

[StarGeek]

Ah, I had forgotten AVIDemux was cross platform.  Good for simple lossless cuts.  The downside is that it is completely unaware of metadata, so you have to copy that back in.

[wywh]

unaware of metadata

Is there any movie re-wrapping or re-encoding app that can preserve metadata from the source?

ffmpeg has some options but I have found the best practice is to carefully use exiftool's TagsFromFile to copy some or almost all metadata from the source to the target.

BTW Avidemux 2.8.1 "MP4v2 Muxer" seems to work best with macOS 13 Ventura QuickTime Player. The old Avidemux "MP4 Muxer" options ("Move index to the beginning of file" and "No optimization") produce .mp4 which some apps open with a black frame. But at least in the past some movies required the old "MP4 Muxer" and its "Use fragmentation" option to succeed at all (with no 1st black frames).

- Matti

[StarGeek]

Is there any movie re-wrapping or re-encoding app that can preserve metadata from the source?

I would assume that some of the higher end programs should copy at least some data over, but that's just a guess on my end.

I have yet to find anything that will copy embedded GPS tracks and EXIF blocks, but that is because there really isn't any standards*.

* Technically there is Google's Camera Motion Metadata Spec but last time I check, there wasn't much support.  Probably time to go searching again.

Phil's quote on the spec

If ExifTool were ever to write streaming GPS, this is the format I would use.

[aperturemode]

Thanks wywh and Stargeek (I need to check my notification settings as I just saw your replies now).

I had no idea exiftool could losslessly rotate videos. That's a great feature!

[StarGeek]

Thanks wywh and Stargeek (I need to check my notification settings as I just saw your replies now).

At the bottom and top right of each thread you can find notification settings for that thread

I had no idea exiftool could losslessly rotate videos. That's a great feature!

This is a "it depends" situation. It requires that the existance of the  QuickTime:MatrixStructure and QuickTime:HandlerType tags.  If one of those doesn't exist, then the Rotation tag will not exist, as Rotation is a Composite tag based upon those two tags.  See its entry on the Composite tags page.

[aperturemode]

Thank you, Stargeek.