I’m so happy about a program that Mauricio Vives told me about that I have to pass it on: Lossless Cut. Free, multi-platform, but so useful that I put money in the tip jar.

It’s a basic video editor, with one key feature: lossless editing. I’ve become the coordinator for a weekly talk series. Microsoft Teams does a nice job of recording the talks automatically, but the video files have a lot of warmup stuff at the start (people joining the meeting) and dead air at the end (it doesn’t stop recording until everyone’s left the meeting). I tried using another free editor, DaVinci Resolve, to trim away the useless bits and export. By default, the new MP4 file was about twice the size of the original! That’s no good. It’s undoubtedly due to whatever compression settings DaVinci Resolve is using by default. I might have eventually figured out some way to set those values, at the risk of muddying the video with a different compression scheme.

Lossless Cut avoids all that, maintaining the original video stream and just editing out the bits you don’t want. It does a bunch of things, but all I care about is trimming away the ends. I did, and it did, amazingly fast: when I did my first export I thought the program had failed, because it took two seconds to make a 200 Mb file. Makes sense, though.

The only confusing thing for me was doing the actual export. This critical command doesn’t appear anywhere in the menus up top. I finally noticed a big button in the lower right corner of the screen that said “Export” – aha. And clicking it comes up with an options dialog and no “OK” button – you need to click “Export” again. Which all sounds obvious when I write it out, but it took me a minute…

Anyway, this post isn’t really graphics related, but ’tis the SIGGRAPH talk season, so I wanted to publicize this wonderful thing as much as I could. Oh, and since I spent ten minutes of my workday writing this post, here’s NVIDIA’s list of papers and events at SIGGRAPH 2024 – there, time and post justified.