Video Editing

1 Lossless or Lossy Editing

When using a lossy video codec such as H.264, a lossless video editor avoids having to re-encode the video as far as possible. At cut and join points it is necessary to re-encode, but otherwise frames can simply be copied over to the new video. Re-encoding video frames always causes a loss of quality. When the resolution or encoding of the video changes, the entire video has to be re-encoded, thus suffering the inevitable loss of quality. The sames holds true analogously for audio encoded with a lossy audio codec such as AAC. Re-encoding always leads to loss of quality.

For best results, always cut, trim, and edit your video and audio with a lossless editor.

I am assuming here that we are working with lossy video and audio codecs, such as H.264 for video and AAC for audio. Completely lossless video and audio codecs do exist, such as the TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC), but they produce huge file sizes.

2 Tools by Platform

The following subsections list some of the tools which are available for each platform. I strongly recommend you cut and edit video on a powerful PC (Windows, Mac, or Unix) with a large high resolution monitor.