Video editor for cutting a video into multiple short clips and store them quickly

Question

Note: Alternatively the question is: "How to cut a video in multiple slices and store each clip as a separate video quickly (!) with Kdenlive?", but I don't think Kdenlive supports an easy way to export single clips.

I am looking for a tool that allows me to slice a video (in a quick way).

At first I tried Kdenlive but it's not really a good tool if you just want to cut a video into multiple short clips and export them (rather fast). In Kdenlive I can only export a selected part of the video or the entire project. But what I want is basically "Cut at frame t and t + n and then just "right click" that slice and save it away as mp4 (or any other common format - it does not really matter).

Kdenlive would be fine if I'd had to do this just to one video but I need to do this to multiple videos as I am trying to create a dataset for a machine learning project of mine.

I know there are a bunch of free tools out there but does anybody know which (if any) of those might be suitable for this (rather boring but necessary) manual task?

Answer 1

shotcut

I would suggest shotcut. It's really fast and allows you to select where to cut at the right place (to the frame). It's also visual making it really easy.

Basic Setup

• Start shotcut
• Give your project a name
• Drag & Drop an MP4 in the screen video area
• Click on the video now playing, move it to the timeline

Cut + Export

• Click on the timeline time (top of the timeline) to select a location.
• Click on the ][ icon to do a cut.
• Right click on the left side and do "Remove".
• Click on the right side and do a "Remove" as well.
• Then Export (File → Export Video ... | Ctrl-E).

Next Cut

Once the export is done:

• Hit Ctrl-Z to restore the clip on the right side.
• Then cut/remove again...
• Repeat until done.

Under Ubuntu, I can install shotcut with:

snap install shotcut

ffmpeg

If you know the start point and duration, then you can use ffmpeg like so:

ffmpeg -ss 0:0 -t 5:0 -i in.mp4 out.mp4

The -ss defines the start point and -t defines the duration. You can use those two and create the cuts in the command line. You can always use shotcut or some other tool to determine the start/duration parameters.