Trim video fast with LosslessCut

We took a break to get more snacks. I need to trim it out.

There was a time when QuickTime was more than just a playback utility; I used it frequently to perform simple video edits, like removing commercials from an off-air recording or tacking the contents of one file on the end of another.

Since those days ended with the deprecation of classic QuickTime, I’ve never really had a go-to utility for these kinds of trims. Sure, I can import the video into an editor and then re-export it, but that requires a second round of lossy encoding, which can make video look lousy. Better is to edit the already-compressed video itself. (This is what I use Rogue Amoeba’s excellent Fission to do with audio. Fission lets me edit an MP3 file without re-encoding it and adding a whole second layer of compression artifacts.)

[Update: Reader Michaël wrote in to point out, amazingly, that at some point years ago Apple added editing features back to QuickTime Player. If I knew about this, I forgot it. If you press Command-Y, you can split clips, and you can delete and re-order those clips. The issue is that the final file you save is a MOV container featuring those clips, which (I believe—tell me if I’m wrong, Michaël!) means that in the end you have to re-encode the video to get a seamless mp4 file for a video podcast.]

A few weeks ago after a Total Party Kill session, I found myself once again needing to perform some trims to the “video bootleg” of the session. In the middle of the game, we took a ten-minute break, and I didn’t want viewers of the video to have to fast forward through 10 minutes of dead air.

This time, I decided to look for a visual utility (i.e., not something I have to drive from Terminal) that could solve this problem. And I found it: the open-source app LosslessCut, which provides a nice interface atop the powerful FFmpeg command-line app.

If I’m being honest, the app is not exactly intuitive, but there’s a bunch of documentation and after about five minutes I had learned every single keystroke required to do exactly what I wanted. The app let me cut segments out of the video, but it also supports rearranging segments, combining tracks, and an enormous set of other features I don’t care about, though you might.

Since the app is open-source and on GitHub, you can get it for free, or you can get it on the Mac App Store for $19 and support the work of developer Mikael Finstad, which is what I did.