Deleting a couple of seconds in a MP4 file without reencoding

[berritorre]

Hi everyone!

This is my first post here and I hope someone can shed a light if this is possible or not.

Just a quick background so it becomes clear of what I want to do / need.

We are doing market research interviews, which are generally documented via audio and sometimes video recording. This are recorded in many different ways, but lately mainly Zoom, so the output is MP4. Now, due to our code of conduct as a market researcher (ESOMAR) we do not pass on private data that can identify a specific respondent (full name, email, place of work, etc). So we ask them to only mention their first name when they present themselves, not to mention data like workplace, school, etc. However, people forget and it just slips out. As they mentioned it themselves knowing that we will share to video with the client or the client is observing, we could probably just ignore it and say they deliberatly mentioned it. But we take this part serious. So what we do is take Audacity and just cut out the few seconds in the audio file. This is reasonably quick.

Now videos is a totally different beast, because if I have a 1-2h interview I takes a lot of time to export the video again, after cutting out the section. These videos are not "art", we just document that the interview was done and what the responses were. So this is nothing fancy, we don't get paid extra for editing. So I would want to keep the work as minimal as possible.

I was wondering if there is a way to cut out a couple of seconds in a video without having to reencode everything, which takes forever and we also have normal office work type of notebooks, no fancy editing workstations, so the processing of exporting a video is slow.

I know that Virtualdub for example can trim videos (but seems like no MP4) at the beginning and the end without having to reencode. But usually my parts are somewhere in the middle and I can't just trim the beginning up to the point, because we might loose important parts of the video.

Does anyone know a software that can do this? Or a way on how to do this with Virtualdub? I haven't found a solution yet. I have some basic knowledge of video editing using Shotcut and Davinci Resolve. Shotcut mainly because Resolve can't handle the audio of the MP4 files that come from Zoom. No idea why.

[usually_quiet]

TMPGEnc MPEG Smart Renderer 6 can cut a number of common types of video and audio on any frame and in smart rendering mode, it will only encode the GOPs adjacent to the cuts. It has a free trial and costs about $70 to buy.

[berritorre]

Hey, thank you for the tip!

Was looking more something free (forgot to mention this), but at the end, if it saves time, I might consider paying as well. Might make sense.

[rrats]

https://superuser.com/questions/377343/cut-part-from-video-file-from-start-position-to...on-with-ffmpeg

[berritorre]

Thanks for the link. I guess I also didn't specify, but a GUI would be good. I might be able to work with the postet approach, but most colleagues won't.

However, either I didn't understand the post right or this doesn't do what I want.

I have a video. I want to keep the whole video, except for a little part somewhere in the middle.

The solutions in the thread allow you to go to a certain point in the video, specifiy a duration or an end point and you can save this specific part in a new video. What I need is to take that specific part out of the video.

[usually_quiet]

Hey, thank you for the tip!

Was looking more something free (forgot to mention this), but at the end, if it saves time, I might consider paying as well. Might make sense.

I don't know of any free smart-rendering editors for mp4 files. Smart Cutter Ps/Ts and SolveigMM Video Splitter cost less than TMPGEnc MPEG Smart Renderer but have fewer features. Maybe one or the other of them will be enough.