Hello, this is Cristi. In today's very short video I'm going to show you a little tool that is free
and it helps you connect many video clips together, merge them into a single file.
And this is important because if you want to do that quickly,
you have different video files that you want to put together into a single video file
and you want to save encoding time, you don't want to encode the files again, maybe you have
them in MP4 and you want to create one long file, then this is a tool for you. It is a free tool
called Losslesscut. I've done a video on this tool before, but this time I'm going to show you how
to actually merge videos together, not cut them separately into segments, like the previous video.
Losslesscut is free, it's based on the FFmpeg software. That it's a command line
software to do operations with videos, but this is a nice interface for that program
to allow you to just drag a few videos onto your program and, you know, change the order,
and then it produces a final video file without re-encoding the files.
So let's have a look at how it works.
So I am here on my desktop. I'm here on my desktop and I have a bunch of video files that I created
for a course. It is an hour and a half of video. So I edited these in Camtasia,
for example, it doesn't matter what you edit your stuff in,
you export the final videos out, and then they are different files, as you can see here,
quite a large size here. So they amount to about 2.7 gigabytes of video and an hour and
a half of video content. And each one is a section, it has to be in a specific order.
And here I have Losslesscut open. The link is in the description to download lossless cut.
And as soon as you install it, you just open it up and you can just drop files onto it.
So let me show you how I'm connecting these files together, merging them. Just select
all of them in your explorer and just drag them on top here. You'll get a window that asks you
what's the order of the video files. Maybe, you know, you want to check the file names,
make sure they're not in the wrong order or anything because
your final video is going to have, is going to be in the wrong order.
So I have them in here in the order I want, just making sure the names are in order like this.
If they're not, you can just click one and drag it to reorder it like this.
And when you are done, you can just click Merge.
You can take all this box here to also include all the audio and file and subtitle tracks.
I don't have those at the moment, but it doesn't matter. I'm just going to
say include all tracks. And if you want to create chapters from the merge segments,
that you can check, check the box here, but in my test that is very slow. So it's going
to take a long time. If you don't check this box, it's going to be rather fast.
You don't even have to specify an output file. It's just going
to produce this final file in the same folder where you brought the files from.
So, you know, I have here 14 files, they're all selected. Let's click Merge.
Okay, so the process has finished and now the file has been produced down here. You can see it's tube
2.6 gigabytes, and the file name is actually the first file that I added. I can just rename that,
that's not a problem. So let's just call this Final video. Here we go. So now let's play this.
So as you can see, the file is playing just fine. And if I scrub here, it's got all my content
in the same file. It's all in order, and there should be the end, there you go. So
it took about 50 seconds to connect together 14 clips. So this is a very useful tool.
If you have to combine a lot of files, video files into one big project,
maybe you have a problem with like Camtasia, for example, which has a problem handling very long
projects, so if you have a very long project, so you need to edit and produce a final course or a
final video or some kind of movie, then it's a good idea to just work on them,
file by file, one by one, section by section, any way you want to break it apart,
and then when you export the final files together, they just produce a single file using Losslesscut.
So one thing though, the files need to have the same size in, you know, resolution, frame rate,
all that kind of thing, compression, in order for this process to work. If you were actually gonna
re-encode these files and maybe drag them on top of another program, and then you put them together
like Camtasia or something else, that would still work, but you already have them compressed, cause
they're all MP4 files. And if you're compressing them again to export them, not only does it take
a long time, but it would also result in more loss of quality because of the re-encoding.
So this way I have the files at maximum quality that I got from the Camtasia work or any other
software you have, and then the combination, the merging of these files in Losslesscut does
not include any re-encoding, so that's why they have to be the same frame rate, the same size,
so that there there's no need for re-encoding, so it results in one final video file.
So I hope this tutorial was useful. Thank you for watching, and if you enjoy my tutorials,
feel free to subscribe to my channel. I will have more videos, tutorials and
training on different video editing software and graphic design
and all of that stuff. So thanks for your time. See you next time.