Lossless Cut is my new favourite tool to cut parts from a video without any hassle
Saturday, October 7th, 2023 at 8:31 am
Lossless Cut is probably the simplest way to cut out parts of a video without having to re-encode it or use an online service. It is open source, free and available for all platforms. It is in essence a frontend for FFMPEG and cuts without re-encoding, so the results are instantaneous.
VideoTap has an amazing feature called Clips, which allows you to highlight parts of the transcript of a video to create shorter videos for social media posts. I got my team on it, but as you pay per minute of converted video it would be wasteful to upload a one hour talk to create a few 15 second videos. So I was looking for simple tools to use and Lossless Cut came up.
Here is how to use it:
- Download the version you need for your operating system (there are free links to installers, but if you want to support the project, you can also download a $20 version on App Stores)
 - Scrub to the part of the video you want to start cutting a part from
 - Press `I` (for `in`)
 - Scrub to the end part
 - Press `O` (for `out`)
 - Hit the export button
 
I love that the tool doesn’t re-encode and supports keyboard shortcuts. Another open source alternative for this task that has a lot more features is Openshot which is purely mouse and context-click driven.