lossless-cut VS ReelSteady-Joiner

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

If you have the max check this out- https://github.com/rubegartor/ReelSteady-Joiner

What's the best way to combine these files to a complete MP4 while keeping all the metadata intact? I did a bunch of google searches, but all the methods I found completely screw all the metadata / additional data streams in the file. I've tested "ReelSteady Joiner" (which just runs ffmpeg in the background), I've tested ffmpeg and udtacopy as suggested on the GoPro Labs page, I've tested various different ffmpeg versions and commands I found through Google.

The easiest fix is to get this program: https://github.com/rubegartor/ReelSteady-Joiner

If you want to stitch these files together and retain gyro data for stabilization, download and use this tool. It will do all the work for you and output a single, big file.