What is the simplest way to do lossless video editing on GNU/Linux? And, in particular, a workflow that works well for simple, cheap, low-budget movies? The technique is rather simple.
-
Look at your video clips in a conventional video player, and create an ordered list of segments you want to include in the final output. Just use the filenames as-is in your list.
-
Use my previous instructions on doing lossless video concatenation with FFMPEG.
-
Now, use the LosslessCut video editor.
So, LosslessCut is a new name in town here, but its purpose is rather simple. It is a lossless GUI video editor that only supports trimming and cutting segments. Fortunately, that’s all we need for the final video editing step. If we want to copy segments or slice and transpose segments within a single clip, we can simply list the segments multiple times in the concatenation list and then just trim away all the extra video information. One great thing about LosslessCut is that it can export a CSV cut list, so you can build a precise command-line to rebuild your final output from the source input. Cutting apparently is restricted to keyframes, though, but hopefully that is good enough for most cuts.
20210109/https://itsfoss.com/losslesscut-video-cutter/
20210109/https://mifi.github.io/lossless-cut/
20210109/https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
For a more sophisticated video editor, Kdenlive still remains a preferred choice.
20210109/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdenlive
UPDATE: It turns out that LosslessCut actually does allow you to easily transpose segments, so you only need to list twice in the initial concatenation list if you want to copy segments. That’s good news!