Bandicut 2.8

If in need of a video cutting and merging tool that is both user-friendly and efficient, Bandicut is an interesting option to consider. It allows you to split nearly any video file into as many fragments as required and put them back together in an equally seamless and quick process. You can also trim videos to get rid of unneeded fragments and even extract the audio stream and save it as an MP3 file.

Cut, Split, and Join are the three options that the app offers you when launched. Cut will let you choose the start and end points of the section or sections you want to extract. You can cut various fragments in one single operation, and merge them into a new video file in a snap. Split will slice the selected video file into a fixed number of segments or in segments of a given duration. You can select from than one video file here and batch-split all of them in one go following your preferences. Finally, Join will merge the selected video files or sections into a unique file.

Both when generating new video fragments and merging existing files into a larger one, you can choose between a High-Speed Mode and an Encoding Mode. The former is not only faster – it will also respect the codec and quality settings of the original file, performing the entire process without in a lossless manner. The latter will let you re-encode the resulting file(s) into the video format of your choice, allowing you to change not only the codec but also a wide range of video and audio quality settings. Extracting the audio stream of the video file or one of its fragments is also possible. Actually, audio cues are just as good as visual ones when it comes to choosing the start and end cutting points, and in some cases, they’re even more important than the images themselves. Having a simple waveform representation of the existing audio stream would certainly be a great addition to this tool, and would help users to extract specific audio fragments out of video files.

Merging video files is done in an equally simple and straightforward fashion. Just select the video files in question – which may well include any of the fragments extracted using Bandicut – and click on the “Start” button. Both the High-Speed (lossless) Mode and the Encoding Mode are available when joining video files into a larger one. The frames at the end and the beginning of the videos selected are glued together in the most seamless way possible, though in a fairly abrupt way. It would be nice to have a set of simple transition effects that we could squeeze in between scenes to soften the overlap zone.

Bandicut’s overall functionality produces consistently good results. Both the waveform graph for the audio and some basic transition effects would help the app to deliver resulting videos of an even better quality, though. Being a commercial – yet affordable – tool, it would be desirable to see its functionality improving in these or in similar directions in the near future.