I have a 3-hour long .mp4 video that has sensible breaks roughly every 30 minutes or so. I want to export this into multiple videos of each section, but have run into nothing but problems trying to do so. This isn't something I do often so I don't really want to invest in commercial tools for this one task, but as yet I can't find any free tool capable of this job.
I really would prefer to just cut this up without having to decode and re-encode the file(s) all over again. I'd like to just mark the sections I want, and spit them out as standalone .mp4s. No other edits, no corrections, no effects, no anything… just cut & export without any formatting changes at all.
I thought Handbrake could do this, but if it can I can't figure out how. I then thought maybe iMovie (10.x as I'm on Mavericks), but that's been nothing but headache and appears to decode the entire movie first before working with it anyway. Quicktime itself seems only able to direct export as .mov and I don't want to re-encode to mp4 all over again.
I keep running into free/open source programs that either are only free in a very limited fashion (like 5 minute max exports, or nasty watermarks, etc.) or that won't run on Mavericks. Is what I'm looking to do just not possible without commercial software? Is it really so difficult to split one long mp4 into several shorter ones?
Best Answer
Here's a tutorial I just made to solve the problem. No pro subscriptions, no nonsense.
QuickTime Export Split Clip Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7MgVBGfFCo
Essentially, you just use the shortcut to split the clip, move the split over to a new file, and save the new file. Quick and easy. Split up an over hour long video into 13 videos or so [1] in 15 minutes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3z1TiLmRFcwBvXbeSmXhYbouKfBKZyZv