Windows: Free Video Editing and Lossless Trimming

Lossless Video Trimming

I needed to trim a portion of video material from the beginning and end of the video, but I wanted it to be immediate and not affect the video in any way. This process is probably called “lossless trimming” or something like that, but there is also cropping with a similar idea, known as “lossless cropping”.

I also wanted a tool that would give me some form of preview, not just a command-line one. And I found two great tools.

scoop install losslesscut vidcutter avidemux

In honesty, both mifi/lossless-cut and ozmartian/vidcutter did an excellent and fast job of completing the task I wanted to finish.

Probably losslesscut and surely vidcutter use ffmpeg in the background which is actually quite okay.

I also mention that avidemux was not successfully installed due to some 7zip error, so I did not deal with it further. Bandicut Video Cutter also looks great and reliable, but it’s not on scoop.

Video Editing for Free

Of course, DaVinci Resolve is without a doubt the best solution that is still completely free. And there is no doubt about it. Also, Lightworks is incredibly good, and also has a completely free plan that is not a trial.

CapCut video editor is also great or even awesome, which is both online and for mobile (and quite superbly) but also for Windows. It has very interesting features, for example text-to-speech and auto-captions, but it’s no wonder - it is made by Bytedance, who owns TikTok, so a lot can be expected from this tool.

But in case something happens to these free versions, for example, Adobe “buys” them, you should also look at the following open-source tools.

scoop install shotcut openshot virtualdub vidiot olive-editor

Video Converters

If you’re interested in video converter or recoder, I always used Handbrake but there are alternatives.

scoop install handbrake xmedia-recode