What's the easiest way to cut clips out of movies?
June 1, 2011 5:18 PM   Subscribe

What is the easiest way to cut clips out of movies on OS X? I use VLC and I'd love to be able to cut out little 10 second pieces by putting in the timestamp of the beginning and end of my desired clip, is this possible?

Bringing entire 2 hour movies into iMovie has never been a quick easy process for me, and often times I'm in the middle of enjoying a movie so it's hard for me to stop doing all of that to cut out a clip.

Bonus question: Right now I've been using my clips for VJ'ing, how would you suggest turning these little 2-10 second clips into animated gifs, quickly and easily on OS X?

Thanks everyone!
posted by ejfox to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
MPEG Streamclip is reported to work very well on Mac for a variety of container and audio/video codec types.

FFMPEG can turn things into GIFs from the command line on any platform, but to save myself some hassle I usually use a GUI such as AVIDemux to first export the frames I want to an uncompressed video type (if starting with a video type that uses keyframes) and resize as appropriate so I don't need to deal with those options without a preview.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 5:24 PM on June 1, 2011 [1 favorite]


Quicktime Pro can do this and you may already have it on your computer.
posted by Winnemac at 5:40 PM on June 1, 2011 [1 favorite]


When I teach, I use Handbrake to rip whole chapters off the DVD and then Quicktime Pro to shorten the clips to the proper length.
posted by gerryblog at 5:45 PM on June 1, 2011 [1 favorite]


The new version of Quicktime Player (Quicktime X), which was released with Snow Leopard, inherited the iPhone's super-easy trim UI (which also displays the timestamp as you drag to trim)
posted by misterbrandt at 6:14 PM on June 1, 2011 [1 favorite]


Thirding Quicktime. I spent a half hour trying to pull out a clip with iMovie and then realized I could do it in about 30 seconds with Quicktime.
posted by alms at 6:52 PM on June 1, 2011 [1 favorite]


Nthing the QT recommendations. It's my preferred tool for basic video editing.
posted by ambulatorybird at 7:39 PM on June 1, 2011


Both VLC and mplayer have support for simple edit decision lists, which might get you what you want.
posted by hattifattener at 11:42 PM on June 1, 2011


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