Video cutting script

Do you need to cuts parts from a video on a regular basis? For example so you can upload individual presentations from a longer live-streamed meeting? Just tell this script what to cut out and set it loose.

Dependencies

Here's the brew summary, adapt to your own package manager:

brew install python3 ffmpeg

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/timendus/cut-video

Or if you prefer pipx:

pipx install git+https://github.com/timendus/cut-video

Uninstalling

pip uninstall cut-video

Or:

pipx uninstall cut-video

Usage

Create a text file defining the cuts you want to make. The file should contain two columns, one with start and optional end times and one with descriptions of the parts. The columns are separated by whitespace:

# TIME(S)         DESCRIPTION
# -------         -----------
00:00             Welcome
01:48-08:55       New colleagues
08:51-10:52       Agenda

Empty lines and lines starting with a # will be ignored. If only a starting time is given, the end time will default to the start time of the next part (or the end of the video). Start time and end time should be noted in hh:mm:ss or mm:ss or ss. Parts may overlap.

Then run cut-video, passing in the source video and the text file you just created:

cut-video ~/Videos/my-video.mp4 ~/Videos/my-video.cuts

This will create a directory ~/Videos/my-video/, based on the file name of the source video, and put all the parts you specified in there. In this example:

~/Videos/my-video/01 Welcome.mp4
~/Videos/my-video/02 New colleagues.mp4
~/Videos/my-video/03 Agenda.mp3

If you run the command again, ffmpeg will ask for each file if you wish to overwrite it or skip it. If you want to overwrite all files, you can pass --overwrite as the third argument to cut-video:

cut-video ~/Videos/my-video.mp4 ~/Videos/my-video.cuts --overwrite