Losslesscut
Will Stapley explains how he reduces lengthy videos in seconds
As a child back in the 1980s, I singlehandedly kept Radio Rentals in business by hiring camcorders all the time - the oversized type that took full-size VHS tapes and left you with backache. Editing my masterpieces was always a chore, though, and involved linking the camcorder to my VHS player having inserted a blank tape. I then had to play the video on the camcorder, while frantically pressing the Record and Pause buttons on my VHS player to capture what I wanted.
Thanks to my smartphone, these days I can record video at a far higher quality whenever I like. But editing on the phone can be just as fiddly. Yep, I can quickly trim the start and end points of clips, but there is no easy way to cut a single long video into multiple segments, then merge them into one. To do this, I fire up Losslesscut - free from www.snipca.com/32407 (for 32bit ending in ‘win32-ia32.zip’ or 64bit ‘win32-x64.zip’).
Common to most open-source tools, it suffers from a confusing design, with oddly named buttons that only reveal their function once you’ve clicked them, so be prepared to spend a little time getting to grips with these.
I used the program recently following a family holiday to sort out my hundreds of snaps and videos. One clip was of a hugely impressive 3D projection on to a cathedral (see screenshots left and above – can you identify the cathedral? letters@ computeractive.co.uk). The clip lasted over ten minutes, so to reduce it to just the best bits I transferred the video to my PC, then dragged it into Losslesscut.
I prefer using keyboard shortcuts over my mouse (press ‘H’ to see a full list). Using the left and right arrows, I navigated near to the start of the first section I wanted to keep, then used the comma and full stop keys to slowly move to the precise cut point, then pressed ‘I’ to mark it. I then used the same process to navigate to the end point of my clip, but this time pressing ‘O’ to mark it. Next, I pressed ‘+’ to start marking the second section I wanted to keep… and so on (see screenshot left).
Once I’d marked all the sections I wanted, I clicked the ‘nm’ button (see screenshot above) to turn off ‘no merging’, which turns on merging (I did say the buttons were confusing) and combines all clips into a single video. I then pressed ‘E’ to export the video, which appeared in the same folder as the original seconds later.
You can also use Losslesscut on audio files, which lets me strip out ads and periods of silence from MP3 files I’ve downloaded or recorded online. It works in exactly the same way – I drag the MP3 file into the program, then choose which sections to keep. Because no encoding is involved during the export process, the quality of the clip isn’t degraded – something full-blown video editors are guilty of.