Quickly Edit & Cut Video Lossless on Mac with LosslessCut
Whether you’re a regular video and audio editor or just have occasional needs to do so, you might appreciate using the handy free LosslessCut app, the “swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing”, which allows for lossless editing and cutting of video and audio files.
LosslessCut lets you quickly extract, remove, add, and combine audio and video tracks from both video and audio files, helping you to make quick work of these tasks without having to re-encode the media file, which typically results in losing quality (hence the lossless feature, and namesake). It’s quite fast and uses the command line ffmpeg tool under the hood.
If you’re unfamiliar with downloading apps from Github, check this out.
LosslessCut is available for Mac, which is obviously our focus here, for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, but you can also get LosslessCut on a Windows PC or Linux machine if you’re interested in having some cross-platform compatibility or usage.
Why does any of this matter? Well, editing lossless video and audio can be essential for modern media workflows, whether you’re a professional, filmmaker, video editor, influencer, producer, broadcaster, hobbyist, or myriad other situations. Lossless editing preserves the original quality of video or audio without introducing compression artifacts, which gains additional importance if you are making multiple edits to the same video or audio, since recompressing lossy media formats will degrade quality over time. So if you’re worried about maintaining pristine quality and fidelity, lossless editing with a tool like LosslessCut ensures that your video and audio will be available for distribution, streaming, archives, publishing, or whatever your needs may be.
And yes, you can make many types of video and audio edits and modifications with iMovie, which is also a great app, but iMovie will re-encode the video thereby making it lossy. If you want some ultra fast lossless video editing (or audio editing), LosslessCut is a great solution, so check it out.
None of your hints and tips for downloading Lossless Cut works! There are no DMG files to download and expand, nor is there a ‘Download’ button which will start the download of the file.
I found it here https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases/tag/v3.64.0
You then have to choose the dmg for your Mac’s processor arm64 if your Mac has an Apple silicon chip, or x64 if your Mac has an Intel chip.
I’ve used the free Shutter Encoder for years, primarily for its function “cut without re-encoding”, which is the same as Lossless Cut.
But its long list of other capabilities begins with Replace Audio; Rewrap; Conform; Merge; Extract; Subtitling; Video Inserts.
I’ve used only a few of these, but in A/V forums and review sites, Shutter Encoder always gets high marks.
Lossless Cut is not free, in France.
Definitely a great product, use it all the time. Extremely quick!