Lossless Cut. When I have an hour of video and I need to extract 5 minutes I reach for Lossless Cut instead of Final Cut. It’s a cross platform GUI built on top of ffmpeg. It can merge clips from the same camera in to a single file and extract pieces of a file, both without reencoding. It compliments the commands documented here. I like that I can watch through a video, mark multiple sections for export, and then export them all at once. Since it doesn’t reencode the video it’s much faster than using conventional video editing software.
A few caveats:
- On MacOS it can read a file over SMB without issue but I’ve found trying to write to SMB causes issues. Someone else reported the same issue but it seems like its an SMB implmentation issue and they won’t be fixing that.
- It often leaves a split second of black frame before and after each extracted clip. Be sure to trim that off before sharing!