Simple Video Cutter
Windows-based tool for efficient browsing and cutting video footage
Available localisations: Polish, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified). Translations are mostly machine based (DeepL). Please contact me if you can help to improve translations in your language.
Goal
Let's imagine you have hours of video footage, dozens of files (videos from your vacations, material copied from your action camera or a drone etc.). Usually only a small portion of this material is worth keeping. So you would like to check the whole material and extract the most interesting/best parts as separate videos (and store them in your archive or publish on YouTube, TikTok etc.). And this is where the simple-video-cutter tool comes in. It helps you quickly browse your videos, preview them and extract interesting parts into separate video files. The main goal is to make this process as efficient as possible. You don't have to select the next file from disk manually, just press "next" and next file (ordered by date) is loaded automatically. Location and filenames of created video cuts are assigned automatically basing on patterns specified in the configuration. The extraction process is done in background (by FFmpeg), so you can work with next material whilst the previous tasks are being processed.
Installation
Download the SimpleVideoCutterApp-win-Setup.exe file and simply execute it. Simple Video Cutter will be installed automatically (program will be installed in user area, thus admin rights are not required for installation).
Warning! Windows may incorrectly identify the installer file produced by Velopack as a threat (see details here). The file of course does not contain any virus or malware, but Windows incorrectly tries to prevent installing it. In this case one can click "more details" and then the button that allows installation will be shown. When enough people do it, the reputation of the file increases and other users will not see any warning.
Another alternative is to use portable distribution (see below).
Portable installation
It is also possible to download portable version of Simple Video Cutter - SimpleVideoCutterApp-win-Portable.zip. Simply unzip the file into desired directory and starts from there.
Virus scanners
Simple Video Cutter uses Velopack (open source installer). It gives a great flexibility and simplifies upgrades which are performed automatically.
Unfortunstelly, binaries produced by Velopack are sometimes detected as virus by different virus scanners. If your virus scanner blocks access to the installer file, I recommend downloading the "standalone" package - svc-standalone.zip - which is built without Velopack support. It is fully functional version of the Simple Video Cutter, the only downside is that updates need to be done manually.
Upgrades
Since version 0.30, Simple Video Cutter uses Velopack framework to automatically manage upgrades. Once new version is published, it will be automatically downloaded and installed during next time application starts. Feel free to visit releases page to manually check whether new version has been published.
Installation of FFmpeg
FFmpeg is required to work with Simple Video Cutter, you can decide to let Simple Video Cutter download FFmpeg automatically or you may also download FFmpeg yourself (FFmpeg can be downloaded for free from FFmpeg release page) and set it's path in the Settings dialog.
Note: see below in case you are going to install portable version of Simple Video Cutter in a directory where users do not have write access.
How to use Simple Video Cutter
- Open a video file
- The video playback starts automatically; press space to pause/resume (or click in the video area)
- You can navigate back and forth through video using timeline control at the botom of the screen. Use mouse wheel (with control key pressed) to zoom in and out the timeline. Mouse wheel without control key scrolls the timeline forward and backward. Press shift key for even faster scrolling/zooming.
- Select a position and press
[(or click the corresponding button) to mark start of your cut - Press
]to mark end of your cut - You can also use mouse middle button to mark your start / end of your cut
- Multiple cuts are supported!
- Watch out for key frames - read more here
- Press
E(or click 'Enqueue' button) to add task to the queue. Selected portion of the video will be extracted (with help of FFmpeg) and saved in a new file(s). - You can inspect pending and running tasks in the tasks list area. Tasks are processed automatically and disappear once completed. Feel free to open next file (and add next tasks) while task is still in progress - they do not interfere with each other and just queue up.
- Use Previous / Next buttons to quickly open next or previous file in the same directory.
Settings
In the settings window you can adjust some options, especially directory and filename pattern of the output files. Supported variables are:
{FileName}- name of the input video file (with extension){FileNameWithoutExtension}- name of the input video file (without extension){FileExtension}- extension of the input video file (with dot){FileDate}- last modification date of the input file (in formatyyyy-MM-dd-HHmmss){Timestamp}- current timestamp (in formatyyyyMMddHHmmss){UserVideos}- shortcut forEnvironment.SpecialFolder.MyVideos{UserDocuments}- shortcut forEnvironment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments{MyComputer}- shortcut forEnvironment.SpecialFolder.MyComputer{SameFolder}- allows to save files in same folder when original video file is located
Portable installation in read only folder
It is possible to install Simple Video Cutter into a non-writable directly. In this case one has to manually install FFmpeg and configure its path in the settings.
Configuration file by default is saved in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\SimpleVideoCutter (which should be writable for end users). Alternatively, the following command line options can be used to specify different location of config file:
--configCurrentFolder- in the same folder where exe file is located--configLocalApplicationData- in theAppData\Local folder(this is the default)--configApplicationData- in theAppData\Roamingfolder (this means the file is copied when user logs in on another machine in domain environment). Please note this option may be useful only if ffmpeg path points to a shared resource as well (e.g. network drive) or it is expected ffmpeg is always installed in the same place on all machines.