How to trim video footage to save space?

[GooseInTheCaboose]

I recently started fooling around with my GoPro and realized that I am rapidly eating up my SSD with lots of garbage footage. Most videos are ~1-2 minutes long, but there are only a few seconds in each video of valuable/good footage! The rest is really garbage.

When I trim the videos in Photos it seems to still save the original footage anyway. What is the easiest way to trim out garbage from your videos in Mac OS? Is there a way to do it WITHOUT losing video quality?

My movies are a mix of 4k and 5k mp4 files

Do I need expensive video editing software for this?

 

[ColdCase]

When you trim in Photos, it essentially adds start and stop markers to the video so you can revert later. All the video is still there. So after you trim, save it as a new clip (should be smaller). You now have two videos, the large original and small trimmed version. Delete the larger original... but its been awhile since I've done this, dunno of an easier way.

If you want to extract multiple short clips from a longer video. Follow the same procedure except don't delete the original. You can revert the original and pick another section to clip out and so on. Then delete the original when you've pulled all the clips you want.

 

[joema2]

What is the easiest way to trim out garbage from your videos in Mac OS? Is there a way to do it WITHOUT losing video quality?...Do I need expensive video editing software for this?

Quicktime Player can trim many codecs without re-encoding. That makes it very fast and it preserves the original quality, no matter how many sequential trim and save operations you do on the same file.

It can not only trim the ends of a clip using CMD+T, but it can cut out or re-order ranges within that clip by using CMD+Y. It cannot do that on all codecs, so you will have to try it on each one. Here is a tutorial about this, "Easily Trimming Video Files With QuickTime Player":

 

[SamC741]

You can compress the video file, this will decrease the resolution and image quality.

 

[bogdanw]

LosslessCut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
VidCutter https://github.com/ozmartian/vidcutter
Avidemux http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/download.html