editly VS lossless-cut

Sounds like you already have a process for most of this, but I found https://github.com/mifi/editly to be incredibly helpful to run ffmpeg and make my little time lapse video. Could be useful for others

For example, this declarative video editor lib has JSON configurations for defining an output video:

Maybe this tool helps: https://github.com/mifi/editly

You seem to misunderstand what ffmpeg is for - namely the stream conversion of media. Only limited filters are available. You can write your own shaders and use cli tools like https://github.com/mifi/editly for automation surely

I used Editly to make a clip of several videos with transitions and screenshots. It worked out great with me just editing the json5 file to tweak things

https://github.com/mifi/editly (Node JS)

It's intended to work nicely with Editly, a CLI-based https://github.com/mifi/editly

The way I would do it would be using MoviePy (for Python). You may also have luck with editly (JavaScript). MoviePy has functions to create a TextClip, Images and overlays. It sure is possibly with ffmpeg filters - transparency mixing filters etc. yet you'd get faster results with modules like MoviePy / editly.

For lossless cut, there's the LosslessCut [1] app, which even has an experimental but mostly working version of a "smart cut" feature [2] (aka. only re-encode the minimal mandatory amount of frames if you trim at a point between 2 key frames)

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

[2]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126

> thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution

It's been possible to create a clip from a video file that merely changes what parts of the video are displayed without effecting the data in the original since the Classic Mac OS days.

If you want to completely remove unwanted portions of a video to reduce the size without a loss of quality, there are many options. LosslessCut is one option that is both free and open source.

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

LosslessCut

Lossless Cut is probably the simplest way to cut out parts of a video without having to re-encode it or use an online service. It is open source, free and available for all platforms. It is in essence a frontend for FFMPEG and cuts without re-encoding, so the results are instantaneous.

Additionally I would like if possible to shorten (both to reduce dimension and to make them less boring) my videos by trimming the beginning and/or ends where often there is nothing interesting happening and possibly change the thumbnails for easier identification. Do you know of any tool that does the job with the minimum quality degradation possible? Many years ago I've tried with some videos and a tool I don't remember anymore, ending up with a bunch of corrupted files :( I've found https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut for the point above.. need to try it. please let me know what experience you have with it.

Lossless Cut would probably be a better choice for this. Will let you cut out the commercials without having to re-encode the video.

>Of course, you could only re-encode only the GoPs that get broken while keeping the rest intact, and I guess this would be better and a lot faster than re-encoding everything. I don't know if any application tries to do this.

LosslessCut does have experimental support for this partial re-encode called "smart cut" [1]. Since it's using ffmpeg internally, the challenge become how to instruct ffmpeg to do this[2]?

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126