Tool for efficiently cutting movies

Question

I am looking for a tool (preferably Windows and freeware) which is able to efficiently select a part of a movie (mp4 and avi), and store it as a separate movie.

With efficient, I mean

1. No visible loss in quality
2. Significantly reducing filesize (i.e. if I select 50% of the length, I expect the result file to be, approximately, half of the size)
3. Easy to use

Typically, the movies that I am working on vary in extension (avi, mp4), in length (10s-60m) and in size (2.5-500MB).

I would like to add that I have tried "Windows Movie Maker", but when cutting down a movie from 32s to 14s, the filesize increased from 2.5 to 3.5MB.

Which tool for Windows fits my requirements?

Answer 1

While it is a bit complicated and not highly intuitive at it's simplest you can do exactly that with AviDemux.

To just cut a section out and do basic compression with no knowledge of formats is not hard to do - I'm sure with a bit of reading of the docs and about formats you could do a better job than random selection but even at a semi-random trial and error selection you can do okay.

• You can extract time bounded chunks of movies. This can be done by pressing the buttons A and B in the above screenshot followed by "Edit > Cut".
• You can compress (quality loss depends on degree of compression - with around 70% compression I had zero visible quality loss on a 5-minute video from a concert I organized recently - while reducing from ~517mb -> ~150mb.)
• It also supports quite a few file types

Answer 2

I use Virtual Dub for this kind of work - specifically in my instance re-encoding videos recorded using FRAPS of me playing games after appending each of the files into a single stream and cutting out the various parts of the video(s) I no longer need.

It doesn't have the best user interface I've seen but it certainly gets the job done and has enough features to meet your requirements, including;

• Easily manipulate videos, cut sections out, append multiple videos together
• Re-encode video into whatever formats you've got codecs available for, at whatever quality levels you choose
• The ability to customise the audio over the video
• Batch exporting to do multiple passes during encoding if you want that

If you cut out half of the video and export it using the same parameters as the video that was imported, you will get a file that is about half the size of what you imported.

It is available in 32 bit and 64-bit versions for Windows.

Answer 3

VideoReDo TV Suite (paid) should do what you want, it's useful for trimming/splitting video files (you can also remove ads in your videos).

This link has a similar question: Edit video file while retaining the original format

With VideoReDo's perfected smart rendering technology you can edit again and again without degrading any of your precious videos.