Need answer fast: can I do a quick destructive edit to cut part of a video?

Factual Questions
1

I’m rendering a video for my boss using Adobe Premiere and am quite used to non-destructive editing, which is typically a very good thing. But I have this 3-hour long video where I really just need to lop off the last 45 min or so of it, and of course Premiere has to go through and render the whole thing which is going to take several hours. It would be better if I could get it done faster and also not tie up the system resources on my machine right now with rendering.

I don’t think I’ve ever had to do a destructive video edit before, but is there a faster way I can go about this?

2

It should be possible to split it at a keyframe without needing to re-render.

Try a search for ‘split’ here, then pick one that looks like it will deal with whatever format/codec your video is currently in.

3

VirtualDub lets me clip out parts of a video without having to re-encode the whole thing. It only works for AVI files, though.

4

Hmm… the original is an H.264-encoded MP4. Looking for something on Mangetout’s link that would work with that.

5

If you have access to a Mac, it’s trivial to do in Quicktime Player - just set your start and end points, and save as a clip.

6

Are you sure that won’t create a new file though?

7

I’ve used Avidemux, which is super basic and you can get a portable version of. Just tell it where to start the cut and where to end.

8

Thanks for the tips folks. I ended up just re-rendering it on another machine that had Adobe Media Encoder before I left for the day (it was gonna take ~4 hours to encode and the main issue was that I was working on my personal machine and didn’t want to stay several hours overtime waiting for the damn video to encode).

I know Premiere isn’t the best editor around and its emphasis is non-destructive editing, but it’s a shame it won’t let you just quickly split a source clip if you so desire. Ah well.

9

I only ever use Sony Vegas…some programs STILL need to render after non-destructive edits? Hell, I almost forgot what a destructive edit was =D

10

I don’t get it.. how could an edit be non-destructive and not require rendering a new file? That’s the whole point of non-destructive editing.

Are you saying you can take a source clip, split it into smaller clips instantly without having to encode or render, and still retain the original, unaltered source clip as well as the subclips, which become individually playable files?

11

Yes.

(To clarify–and maybe this is where I’m mis-understanding–they become individual playable files within the context of the video project itself. If I want to make actual videos out of them, I’d need to export/render them, just as I would for the entire project).

12

Yeah you misunderstood. The clips you see in the video editing program are only preview clips… they are not playable files until they are rendered and encoded. In this situation, I had a big file and I needed to cut some of the footage off the end to create a smaller file which would play on its own in a media player without the tail end that I wanted to cut. But because it was still a really long video and I was working on a laptop with only 4 GB RAM, that meant several hours of render time, which is what I was trying to avoid.

13

Ah, I gotcha now. Yes, that sounds like it would be annoying to rerender.

14

Make a copy of the pre-edit video file, then go ahead and do the destructive edit. If it works, great, and if not, then you’ve still got the original to fall back on.

15

What you’re describing is possible with some types of video file, as long as the split takes place at a full keyframe. All subsequent frames are dependent on that keyframe, so the process of splitting can just (more or less) take a chunk of the file and copy it.