How to trim a video using Lossless Cut

Owned by Andrew Molloy
Last updated: May 03, 2022
2 min read

Lossless Cut is a free program that trims videos with no loss of quality (it does not reencode).

Example Lossless use cases

  • Cut unwanted intro or outro sections from a Zoom or Kaltura video.
  • Remove audio tracks from a file
  • Extract music track from a video and cut it to your needs
  • Add music to a video (or replace existing audio track)
  • Combine audio and video tracks from separate recordings
  • Include an external subtitle into a video
  • Quickly change a H264/H265 MKV video to MOV or MP4
  • Quickly cut a file by its MP4/MKV chapters
  • Quickly cut a YouTube video by its chapters (or music times from a comment)
  • Attach cover art to videos
  • Change author, title, GPS position, recording time of a video
  • Fix rotation of a video that has the wrong orientation flag set
    • Great for rotating phone videos that come out the wrong way without actually re-encoding the video.
  • Loop a video / audio clip X times quickly without re-encoding
  • Convert a video or parts of it into X image files (not lossless)

Example: trim the first 10 minutes and last 10 minutes of a video

  1. Open the video file.
  2. To cut a portion of the intro, on the green time bar, position the white time line cursor at the spot you want to cut.
  3. Click the 'Set cut to start position' button.
  4. This will mark the intro segment with a trash can icon for deletion.
  5. To cut a portion of the ending, position the white time line cursor at the spot you want to trim.
  6. Click the 'Set cut end to current position' button.
  7. This will mark the end segment with a trash can icon for deletion.
  8. Click the blue Export button in the lower right corner.
  9. This will bring up the Export Options window. Change any options as needed but we recommend the following:
    1. Output container format: mp4
    2. Cut mode: Normal cut (or Keyframe cut if you can't get it to trim exactly where you want it, as the cutting process can shift the frames slightly; you may need to reset your cut point a few frames before to get it to cut on the exact frame)
  10. Click the blue Export button to output the new file.