looking for some recs for some super basic simple sotware for trimming down longer movies into shorter video loops/clips. I’m on a mac and can use quicktime, but would ideally like something wthat can handle a wide variety of video formats. thanks in advace 
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Recently I have been trying an open source video editor called olive. It is still in alpha but so far I’m finding it really intuitive and easy to use and working pretty stable. I’ve edited a few clips with it so far and been really happy https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/
(If you have lagging while scrubbing I can recommend using a clip proxy by right clicking on the media object and selecting create proxy )
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awesome. thanks. will give it a go tonight
we need more tools like this for sure, especially with apple binning Quicktime. Simple tools that do one thing well are vital. I’m still using MPEG Streamclip (http://www.squared5.com/) while i can but it’s not been updated in donkeys.
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Under Quicktime, have you used [CMD] + [T]? You can set in and out points and export directly from there. Once you’ve edited, [CTRL+Z] to undo the Trim and redo as required.
Obviously, depending on OS version you may limit yourself to codec export options.
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Not quite what you’re looking for but this tool is great for isolating really interesting ‘seamless’ loops from video files, with variable length (if I remember right). Worth checking out!
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will check it out. thanks
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Just a quick video to explain it all.
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thanks for the link
just popping by to say thanks for the responses. I’ve been using the quicktime trim feature to create small clips out of longer videos. its straight forward and works quickly. Only small PITA is trimming a clip, having to save, then “undoing” the trim to restore the full length and repeating the process. Would be cool if you could create multi-part trim sections and batch save them all as seperate clips. But hey, I ain’t complaining having a simple free tool that gets the job done
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Does quicktime really save videos without reencoding? How does it handle GOP then???
I have to mention this
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/download.html
It copies the bitstream, the only problem with it being you have to start with a keyframe!
Something that I would like to see in a simple video editor would be the ability to do ‘Beats and Bars’ instead of timecode/feet & frames.
My dayjob is cutting in Premiere, so I do a lot of trimming in that (you can kinda pair it down with custom workspaces, so it’s really fast), but i’ve got a Windows VM with an ANCIENT copy of Vegas specifically because it will change the timescale of a sequence to Beats & Bars.
Additionally, have some sort of draggable Stretch option (similar to the R tool in PPro) is really handy for retiming loops to get them snapped into a grid.
Finally. . . PPro has an ‘Edit Detection’ feature that’s in public beta that I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on. . .
. . . but if there was a small, open source, multiformat Video Editor with Beats & Bars, Rate Stretching, and Edit Detection for larger clips, I’d lose my shit, shout it from the rooftops, and literally tell everyone I knew about it.
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I’m not 100% sure if this is what you are looking for but Reaper can be used to edit video has in built effects & tools decent amount of rendering options. I’m currently testing this since I come from the audio daw world.
Reaper is great for this. The initial setup is a little cumbersome (not a huge deal, but you have to set it up to sue FFMPeg for encoding if you want a good selection of codecs and file formats), but after that it’s simply a matter of dropping markers on the timeline at the points where you want to split the file, then go back, double click between two markers on the ruler to select a range, press shift+r to create a region, repeat for every range you want to export as a file (you could also skip the markers, select the ranges manually and make regions as you go, but I find it more convenient to go through the whole video placing markers and then selecting between them and making regions after that), then open the render dialogue and choose “project regions” from the bounds dropdown in the upper right.
You lose a generation of compression (unless you have the drive space to save your clips as lossless h264 or something) bu usually as long as you don’t set the compression level too high it looks fine.
whoa, no one mentioned handbrake yet. super handy for bulk clip trimming and rencoding if u prefer gui to command line
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I forgot Handbrake - it’s a good tool. The only thing I wish it did is joining multiple videos together…
Pretty strange to me that no one mentioned Shotcut