Lossless Cut is a free portable cross-platform program that enables you to cut videos in an easy to use interface without quality reductions.
The program is quite the heavyweight when you consider its archive size of 80 Megabytes, but it ships with all components included that you may need to cut a video file.
The interface has been streamlined which means that it is dead easy to use. Drop a video file on the interface, select start and end positions for the cut, and click on the cut button afterwards to cut it.
The cut part of the video is saved automatically to the same directory. The process does not overwrite the original video though, as information about the video’s start and end time in relation to the original video are added to the file name.
Lossless Cut
You can play the video in the interface if you want and hit the start and end position for the cutting while it is playing.
You may skip the playing entirely however and jump to the parts that you want to cut manually using the mouse.
You’d need five clicks to cut a video if that is the case. Two to select the start and end position with the mouse, two to set them, and one to save the cut video to the local device.
The only other option provided is to capture single frames. This is done by selecting the frame first and clicking on the “capture” button in the program interface afterwards.
The captured frame is saved as a jpeg image to the same directory as its video source.
Lossless Cut does not do any encoding or decoding, and it pretty fast because of that. The program uses the excellent ffmpeg to do the cutting and saving of the resulting video.
While it has been designed for video, it can be used to cut many popular audio formats as well. The process is identical for the most part and the main difference is that you get a black preview instead of video.
Audio previews work however so that you may hit the play button to select cut positions while the audio file is playing.
The program is based on Chromium and uses the Chromium HTML5 media player. This means that some formats may not be supported. According to the author’s website, formats such as mp4, mov, webm, mkv, ogg, wav, mp3, aac, h264, vp8 and vp9 are supported
Lossless Cut supports a range of keyboard shortcuts that you may use to improve your workflow. Use j and l to slow down and speed up the video, left and right cursor keys to seek backward or forward for one second, or . and y to seek even less than that.
The i and o keys mark the start and end point of the cut video, and e and c export the selection or capture a snapshot.
Closing Words
Lossless Cut is a handy program that is easy to use and fast thanks to its lossless nature. It is ideal for cutting large video or audio files, but may also come in handy if you like to create animated gifs. While it cannot create those for you, it can be used to cut the right part of a video for that.
Now You: Do you edit video on your computer?