Easy Video Editing with LosslessCut

Sometimes, I need an easy way to do basic video editing. It's nothing flashy. I just want to chop sections out, remove the dreaded 'millennial pause' from the start, and maybe stitch some files together. I don't need anything fancy, with no green screens or special effects required. There are lots of video editing programs that can do all that and more, but for this specific scenario, the easiest way that I have found to do video editing is by using LosslessCut.

LosslessCut is a platform-independent program (yes it’s available for Linux), which is free and has a range of features, including:

• Lossless trimming and cutting of audio and video
• Merging clips in a single file
• Track extraction
• Convert files into different formats

One of the main reasons I chose LosslessCut is due to its speed. Where most other video editors take a long time to render the final output, LosslessCut doesn’t transcode or re-encode the frames. This means that the video output will be the same quality as the input (hence the 'lossless' part of the name) and the whole process is much, much faster.

I found that you can use this 'as-is', the settings are mostly fine to leave as default. The only change I would recommend is the precision of the segment cutting. The default settings cut at the ‘nearest keyframe’, which is determined by the encoding of the video file. It is possible to override this and trim the video to the precise moment required if the nearest keyframe is not near enough.

Next time you need a basic video editor, give LosslessCut a try - what it lacks in advanced features it more than makes up for with its efficiency and ease of use. Happy editing!

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