Christian Heilmann

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 with a video with defined in and out cutpoints

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.

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