MOV is the QuickTime container that every iPhone, iPad and Mac writes by default. Camera footage, a screen recording made with Command, Shift, 5, a FaceTime recording, a clip from Photos: all of them come out as MOV. Since iOS 11 the video inside is usually HEVC, and that is where many online tools stall. They either reject the container or fail to decode the codec, and the advice becomes "export to MP4 first".
For transcription the codec is beside the point. Transcrify only needs the audio track, and the audio in a MOV is ordinary AAC or linear PCM regardless of whether the picture is HEVC, H.264 or ProRes. The container is opened on our servers, the sound is decoded and the video data is never touched. You upload the clip exactly as it left the device.
That also means an export would gain you nothing. Re-encoding to MP4 takes time, costs picture quality and leaves the audio unchanged. Skip it.
A talking-head video shot on an iPhone at arm's length transcribes very well, because the microphones sit close to the speaker. A lecture filmed from the fifth row is harder: the voice is distant and the room adds echo, and the transcript will show that in the quiet passages. If you record events regularly, a small lavalier or a shotgun microphone on the phone changes the result more than any setting on this page.
QuickTime screen recordings with microphone narration are a common case for tutorials and bug reports. The narration is transcribed with timestamps, which gives you a written walkthrough to paste into documentation or a ticket. If the recording also captured system audio through a virtual device, that sound is transcribed too.
Every segment carries a timestamp and a speaker label. More than fifty languages are recognised automatically, so a clip with a Spanish interviewer and an English guest needs no setting.
iPhone video is large. A minute of 4K at 60 frames per second is around 400 MB, and a half-hour recording can exceed ten gigabytes. Because the upload is sent in small chunks, the file size is not the limit; the length is. As a guest you can transcribe recordings of up to 3 hours. The upload itself depends on your connection, and a long 4K clip over Wi-Fi may take a while before the transcription even starts.
If upload time matters more than keeping the original, Photos on iPhone can export a smaller version, or you can transcribe the clip from a Mac over a wired connection. Once the file has arrived, the transcription takes a few minutes; an hour of audio is typically done in three to five.
Camera roll videos are personal by nature. The speech models run on servers we operate, and the audio is not forwarded to a third-party speech API. Guest transcriptions are kept under the same rules and move into your account if you create one later.
As a guest you read and copy the transcript. A free account adds the editor, your transcription history and downloads in SRT, VTT, ASS and TXT, with 5 hours across 10 files. AI chat with the recording, summaries and export to PDF or Word belong to the paid plans.