ClipCut
A drag-and-drop desktop tool for trimming, cropping, and exporting video clips fast, built to skip the overhead of a full NLE for quick one-off clips.
Most of the clips I need to make are small: trim the dead air off a screen recording, crop a downloaded video down to the bit that matters, pull just the audio out of something. None of that needs a timeline-based editor, it just needs to be fast, so I built ClipCut: drop a video on the window, mark the cuts, drag a crop box if you need one, and export.
It’s a Python app running on PySide6 for the UI, with FFmpeg doing the actual encoding underneath.
Cutting without losing quality you don’t have to lose
The default trim mode snaps to the source’s keyframes and stream-copies the result, no re-encoding, no quality loss, and it’s instant regardless of the clip’s length. A frame-accurate mode is there too for when you need an exact cut point badly enough to pay for the re-encode.
Multi-cutMultiple cuts from one source, managed as a list: select, delete, keep-only-selected, or merge a contiguous run into one.
Scene detectionRuns a threshold-based scan and replaces the whole cut list with one cut per detected scene change.
Export modesEach cut as its own file, or every cut concatenated into one combined output via a fast stream-copy join.
Crop and export, staying out of the way
The crop tool is drag-and-drop guides with corner handles, an aspect-ratio lock with presets (or the source’s own native ratio), and a toggle between one shared crop for every cut versus an independent crop per cut. There’s also a Zoom mode alongside Crop: instead of just cutting the frame down, it crops into a region and scales that back up to the source’s size, with guardrails so it can’t be silently combined with lossless Keyframe trimming. Zooming into the preview itself is cursor-anchored, so scrolling in on a specific detail keeps that point under your mouse instead of recentering the view on you.
Export leans on the same instinct as the trimming: don’t re-encode unless the export choice actually requires it. Picking a specific format (or a specific audio codec) always re-encodes, since that’s a deliberate conversion, but the default paths stream-copy wherever the container and codec already line up, including audio-only exports, which pick a container to match the source’s audio codec instead of assuming everything is AAC.
VideoOriginal (stream-copies where possible), MP4 (H.264/H.265), WebM (VP9), MKV, or AV1.
AnimatedGIF or WebP export with frame rate, palette, dithering, and gifsicle optimization controls.
Audio-onlyOriginal (matches the source codec's own container losslessly), M4A, MP3, Opus, FLAC, or WAV.
Where it’s at
It’s my daily tool for anything that would otherwise mean opening a full editor for a thirty-second job. Still actively growing in small increments, mostly driven by hitting a rough edge myself and fixing it the same day, rather than any fixed roadmap.
It outgrew being a single script a while back, but I kept bolting features onto it anyway. Adding Zoom mode was the tipping point: it needed to interact with crop, scale, and the lossless-trim guardrails all at once, and doing that cleanly in one file wasn’t realistic anymore. That pushed a proper split into a clipcutlib package (mixins, ffmpeg helpers, widgets, app bootstrap), which made the Zoom mode work possible in the first place.
The UI needed the same rethink. Lossless Keyframe trim used to just be a checkbox sitting next to everything else, which meant it was on you to remember it couldn’t coexist with crop, zoom, or scale. It’s now a proper guardrailed mode instead: pick it and the UI locks out the operations that would break it, rather than letting you find out the hard way on export. Small as that sounds, it’s a sign of what ClipCut’s actually become: less a quick trim script, more a real (if focused) editing app.
Source’s on GitHub.