Video Edit Pro - Video Trim 4+

I had struggled for hours with iMovie and FinalCutPro and failed to learn how to trim the beginning off a video, so I bought this simpler application. I then still struggled until a friend had a look, and figured out that when you hit "Add Trim Marker", the red triangle that appears at the point where you want to trim the video, splits into two, such that, if you want to trim the bit before the triangle marker, you drag the left half of the triangle to the left, then when you hit the "Delete marked segment", that bit you selected by dragging that half-triangle is deleted. Finally! IT is actually easy. It just was in no way obvious to me that the triagle marker split in two and that you drag half of it to select what you want to trim. (I would give the application 5 stars had it been more obvious how to select a part to trim.)

Ever since the old, simple, reliable quicktime went away, it has been hard to find a simple video editor that could trim clips down, or merge them. This provides that and I went ahead and bought the $4.99 version. But it isn’t perfect, but it will do. First, the interface is silly and very unMac. On the video trim page, every time you have to push the Add Trim Marker button in order to get the clipping marks to show up. And when you press delete marked video segment, you get a “are you sure you want to do this” alert box. Rather than have that, they should add a simple undo button. That way if you make a mistake, you can simply correct it without having to click yes every time. The Snapshot button is a joke. You cannot specify what you want to title snapshots, nor can you specify into what file the snapshots go. You cannot resize the interface window. You are stuck with its standard size of the interface window. I do like that it lets you export into several formats, but the exporting is SLOW. Not a great software, but it gets the job done.

For users that are very aware of how much space transcoding takes up, this application is excellent. Many of the movies I keep are in the MP4 format and if I wanted to trim off the end of the credits or a long company logo at the start, I used to bring it into final cut pro, transcode it to Pro Res and then edit and then transcode it back to MP4. I thought it was a necessary evil as I have been trying to find an MP4 EDIT that doesnt need space for transcoding-- especially if you are just going to be keeping the final product in the MP4 format. The program is great for this kinds of time consuming jobs. It doesn't replace final cut for complex work, but the time savings and the minimal hard disc space usage during processing is huge. I strongly recommend this application to anyone who has an MP4 movie/clip library of more than 300 items and wants to trim them, just a bit.