Chopping up video clips

I’m looking for a quick uncomplicated way to cut video to segments under 5 mins in order to populate Day One using my Mac.

I appreciate there my be iOS methods and I am not opposed to hearing about those, but I am wondering whether anyone in the community can recommend anything that they rely on?

I have Screenflow and iMovie but I am looking for something that literally allows me to cut before 5 mins to create how ever many videos it takes to complete the project before populating Day One.

I haven’t done this specifically, but it should be simple using FFmpeg to cut the video up into 5 minute segments.

I’m not aware of any way to cut a video into 5 minute segments automatically.

I’m sure that you could find a way to script ffmpeg to do this, but I’m not that level of Jedi.

There is a free app called LosslessCut which you can find on GitHub:

You can load the video into LosslessCut and use o for “out” and i for “in”. You can select the timeline with your mouse and then use the arrow keys to do more fine selections.

Go to 4m59s, press o for ‘out’.
Go to 5m00s, press i for “in”.
Go to 9m59s, press o for ‘out’.
Go to 10m00s, press i for “in”.
etc

Then you can export from LosslessCut as separate files (you’ll need to set that in the preferences, otherwise it will merge the files, which will definitely defeat your purpose!)

HTH. The UI of the app isn’t lovely, but it works well. It’s the best option that I’ve found since QuickTime 7 is no longer a viable option.

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The real “swiss army knife” for video, ffmpeg, does the job.

ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -c copy -map 0 -segment_time 00:05:00 -f segment -reset_timestamps 1 segment%03d.mp4

I just tested it on a whole movie and since it doesn’t recode with these options, it flies through the file.

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not aware of, but Quicktime app is very straightforward.

Just a quick follow up to this… I found the solution by exporting IN and OUT points within Screenflow (Which I already have).

It was functionality that I didn’t realise it had. The EXPORT SELECTION which worked a treat and was exactly what I needed.

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