Is there a mac application that will cut a movie into clips of X length?

July 10, 2013 1:51 PM

I want to give it a video and say "cut this into clips of 30 seconds/10 minutes/whatever" and have it spit out the clips as movie files. Is there an OS X app that can do this? Or some way to do it with automator?

If there isn't some automated way to do it, can anyone suggest an application / workflow that would make this speedy? Right now I'm editing it in Quicktime and it's slow goings, especially for daunting 10 minute clips I want to make 30-second-snippets out of.

posted by ejfox to Technology (2 answers total)

Explicit will cut files, though only in two segments (of any time you want) so for multiple segments you would have to do it manually.
posted by TheRaven at 2:19 PM on July 10, 2013

Best answer: How comfortable are you copy-pasting code from the internet? I've had Great Success in such endeavors by doing targeted keyword searches in Google and punching what I find into Terminal and/or a new .py file. For instance, this came up fairly early in the results for my search on this topic: Auto-splitting video file in equal chunks with ffmpeg and python. There's a .py script file locked in a .zip folder that you can download from that page.

The learning curve for this sort of thing is a little steep. You may have to look into how to install, arrange, and/or access Python and ffmpeg (through a terminal), and also tweak settings in the script (like how long you want the segments to be), but if you can power through that initial hard part the introduction to ffmpeg will change your video-editing life. It is a wonderfully powerful program.
posted by carsonb at 2:26 PM on July 10, 2013