Even though everyone is uploading Youtube videos these days, not many know how to record videos like a professional. Many of us just press the “Record” button and keep on recording everything thinking that we can edit it later. This way we end up with multi-gigabytes video files with only a few useful portions. If you want to quickly extract all the interesting parts from your large video file then you can use the free and open-source LosslessCut application.
LosslessCut is an open-source and cross-platform application for lossless trimming or cutting of large video files into smaller segments using another open-source tool FFmpeg. The download is almost 100 MB for a very simple interface tool which is a little excessive, to be honest. In the LosslessCut window, you simply have to drag-n-drop a media file which could be either a video file or an audio file. Since it is powered by FFmpeg, it supports a large number of media file formats.
After loading a media file, you can set the start and end markers to select the portion of the media file that you want to “cut”. From the smaller buttons near the lower edge of the window, you can select various options like the encapsulation, encoder, speed, video streams, whether to keep audio or remove it, the rotation angle of the video, the folder where the extracted video file will be copied, and more. Now you can simply click on small scissors icon and it will quickly extract/cut the selected video portion. The video clips are saved automatically with a new name in the same folder as the original file by default.
LosslessCut is also able to convert the selected video using a faster codec to make the video file smaller or encode it using a slower codec to maintain the quality of the original video file. But unless specified, it will simply extract the video in the same format as the original file without encoding or losing the original quality.
You can download LosslessCut from https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/.