I am seeking a video editing program that will enable me to delete individual frames from an mp4 (or similar) clip.
I have tried splitting clips using Avidemux 2.6 and MP4Splitter without anywhere near the accuracy I need.
Hopefully a software program is available that is either open source (i.e. free) or reasonably priced.
Does anyone know of a frame by frame deleting program, please?
Sincerely, PaulRanger1.
Any true video editing program will let you delete frames. You then must render and export the edited material. For Macs, possibly the least expensive best program is iMovie. It is easy to use and fast.
If you are talking about specialized utilities to extract or delete frames within a video file without re-rendering, this is difficult to do. MP4 or any H.264 codec is a "long GOP" format. Most of the frames are not even there -- they are eliminated during the encoding process, and only data about frame differences is stored. So deleting a few frames is much more complex than deleting frames from an MJPEG video file where every frame is present as a separate JPG image.
With long GOP formats, deleting frames requires reading the file, decoding and materializing the missing frames, updating the GOP and all relevant data structures, then closing the file and hoping nothing got messed up. On a previous project I tested a lot of these on Windows and they either didn't work at all or still required rendering and re-encoding or seemed to work but messed up the file. In general I don't trust them.
In some cases it wasn't even obvious the file was messed up. Some players would play it but then some editors would reject it. Sometimes other players would crash trying to load it. Sometimes it would play but the head and tail of the extracted clip were mangled or would show problems only in certain players.
If you use any "no encode" split, join or frame delete utility there is a risk it could mess up the file or subtly degrade image quality. Therefore you should extensively test it before committing any important work. This means a lot more quickly playing it in Quicktime or VLC. If you don't have time to do this, I would suggest just sticking with a full-fledged editing program like iMovie, Resolve, or Premiere. Of those Resolve is free but very complex to use -- the manual os over 1,000 pages. iMovie is free or nearly so and easy to use.
