The video editor is a very powerful and extremely complex application that can be used to edit your amateur videos into professional-looking masterpieces with background music scores, but only if you have the patience to master the interface. Sometimes, you just need to quickly cut the unwanted parts of the video, or merge some clips together. A feature-rich video editor is too much for these tasks. Instead, you can use VidCutter, which is a minimalist video editor that uses Ffmpeg to perform surgery on your video files.
VidCutter is released under the GPLv3 license and follows the old Unix philosophy of doing one thing well. Unlike more complex applications (such as DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere, etc.), VidCutter is designed to only cut video files or join them together, although without any special effects. This makes VidCutter very suitable for home users, even amateur broadcasters who only need to make some adjustments to the video before release.
How to install Vidcutter
Vidcutter is mainly a Linux video editor. In this tutorial, we will install the Snap package version on the Ubuntu 20.04 system.There are installation candidates for other versions of Linux, as well as for Windows and macOS.
1. Open the terminal and install Vidcutter using the snap package manager.
$ sudo snap install vidcutter
2. Press the Super (Windows) key and type “vidcutter”, then press Enter to start the application. This can also be done through the terminal.
Install Vidcutter using Apt package manager
If you prefer to install Vidcutter through the Apt package manager, there is a Personal Package Archive (PPA) for Ubuntu users.
1. In the terminal, add the PPA to your list of repositories. Press Enter when prompted to enable this feature.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ozmartian
2. Update your software repository.
$ sudo apt update
3. Install Vidcutter.
sudo apt install vidcutter
4. Press the Super (Windows) key and type “vidcutter”, then press Enter to start the application. This can also be done through the terminal.
How to use Vidcutter
Vidcutter’s interface is quite simple and customizable. We can switch between light and dark themes, between plain text buttons or buttons with text below. The latter option is meaningful, especially for novice users, even though Vidcutter is very intuitive to use.
To start processing video files,
- Click the Open Media button and select the file you want to use.
- Click the “Start Editing” button Determine the starting point of the part you want to keep.
- When the video is playing, click the “End Clip” button To identify the end.
- Repeat the process Edit the video into multiple parts until you are satisfied with the editing.
- Click Save Media Save your edited clip.
Unlike other video editing tools, VidCutter does not provide extensive export options. Instead, you have a tool that supports multiple formats, such as AVI, MP4, MPEG 1/2, WMV, MP3, MOV, 3GP, FLV, etc., and it will automatically retain the format of the parent clip when saving the shortened clip.
Remove audio from clip
Sometimes we need to remove audio from the video, for example when we want to add narration or background music. With just a few clicks, Vidcutter can easily remove audio from the clip.
- Load the video into Vidcutter.
- Right-click the clip and select Media Stream.
- Click the check box under “Audio” in the “Media Stream” dialog box to delete the audio.
Vidcutter developers have been working on improving VidCutter. Although Vidcutter can never be compared with a complete video editor, it is a useful tool for quick editing through a simple user interface.
