Locate Each Frame - Frame by Frame cutting/splitting/trimming MTS videos on Mac

People nowadays like shooting meaningful things with cameras. After coming back from a holiday trip, a wedding ceremony, a birthday party, a lecture or somewhere else, it’s common to have loads of video clips (e.g. .mts files) stored in your camera. Usually, people would like to burn these recordings onto DVDs for storage or delivering use; also, there are people who would like to do post-production on them in NLE applications, such as iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, and Avid Media Composer. Before processing video editing, it’s better to have all these video clips (MTS) ready for working within your editing system, this would make things easier and smoother in NLEs. That’s why we often saw people asking for a frame by frame cutting tool to help them simply split/trim unwanted parts of camera clips.

To locate an accurate frame for cutting/splitting/trimming MTS videos on Mac, Pavtube Media Magician for Mac is a great assistant tool. It targets to be an ideal camcorder companion for Mac users, featuring frame accurate splitting facility on MTS clips or camera videos with other extensions, such as TOD, MOD and M2TS.

The free trial version of Pavtube Media Magician for Mac has the following limitations:
1. It will add Pavtube logo watermark in output file(s).
2. Lossless output has a file size limit of 5 minutes.

If the free trial version does what you want, you can click Buy Now button below to purchase its full version to bypass the above mentioned free trial limitations.

With enhanced frame accurate seeking capability, Media Magician for Mac enables you to locate and display each frame precisely so that you can easily get the desired frame of the MTS movie to split or cut.

The steps to process frame by frame MTS cutting/splitting/trimming on Mac

1. Add MTS clips into Media Magician for Mac
There are two ways available to import source media files:
1) Import from camera/camcorder
Connect your camera/camcorder with your Mac computer and run Pavtube Media Magician for Mac. This frame accurate video editor for Mac program will detect your camera or camcorder automatically and ask “Camcorder is connected. Are you ready to launch wizard now?” Click “Yes” to confirm.

In the mean time, you are allowed to backup MTS footage directly from camera to local computer. Also, you can click the camera icon to load camcorder videos as well.

2) Import from local computer
If you have already stored MTS clips on your HDD, you can choose to “Import Media Files” or “Import Media Folder” to browse and load source files from computer.

2. Drag and drop AVCHD MTS files onto Timeline
After source MTS clips are imported into the program, you can directly drag and drop the clips that you want to do frame accurate splitting onto timeline. To select multiple clips on list, you can press Command Key and click.

3. Split/Cut/Trim MTS video by frames accurately

On the preview window, you can use Frame Selection Controller to seek to the corresponding frame of the current image, or seek the previous frame/next frame for locating desired frames accurately.

After the desired frame selected, please click “Cut” button on timeline to split/cut/divide the MTS clip at a very precise point. Then highlight the clips you want to delete from the timeline, and click the “Delete” button next to the “Cut” button to remove the unwanted parts.

Control buttons on Timeline
The control buttons on timeline help you locate frames accurately so that you can cut, trim, delete, and merge video clips in a much easier way.

1. Time Display Controller: Move your mouse cursor on timeline, the opposite time point will be displayed here. Once you entered a time point into the time display box and click enter, the Preview Window and Timeline will switch to the frame of this time point. This helps to locate to the accurate frame that you want.

2. Zoom in and Zoom out: Drag the bar on top-right of timeline to Zoom in or out for better view.

3. Preview: Highlight a clip on timeline and click Play button, you can preview. Double click on a clip can also begin preview.

4.Trim: Put your cursor to the start or end point of a clip on timeline until it changes to trimmer. Drag the trimmer and you can trim off unwanted starting or ending.

5. Cut: Drag the pointer to the right place; Put your cursor to process bar under preview window and select the right frame; Click the Scissors button and you can cut the clip. And then you can rearrange order or delete.

Cut the clip at where the cursor locates

6. Delete: Highlight the unwanted clip on timeline, and click Delete button. You can also delete it with right-click menu.

7. Rearrange order: Drag and hold a clip to the right place until the place line shows. Drop the clip and it will be placed right there.

8. Merge and join: All files placed on timeline will be output as one file. So if you want to merge and join several clips, just drag them to timeline in right order.

4. Export MTS to MTS without re-encoding on Mac

Choose “Output” in the main interface, and click “Plus” icon to add conversion task before selecting output format. Then switch to “Lossless” > “original” and click “Start” to begin exporting MTS to MTS without recompression on Mac.

Please pay attention to the following matters while using Lossless Output:
1. Currently it only supports MTS, M2TS, MOD, TOD formats;
2. The format and codec of video files on timeline should be substantially the same;
3. Any editing effects (such as Effect, Audio, 3D) will be ignored when output.

For more detailed information about this frame accuracy cutting tool, please refer to Media Magician for Mac Review.

Tags : frame accurate video editor for Mac, ideal camcorder companion for Mac, mts frame by frame cutting, cut the mts file, split the mts file, mts editor, frame by frame edit