Nondestructive video editing and trimming

With iOS 13, it appears the option to trim a video and save as a new clip has been removed. This means when I shoot a 20 minute video and only would like to keep one minute of the video, the entire 20 minute video will still be stored on my device and in iCloud. If this is truly how this works, this is not acceptable. Please bring back the save as new clip function.

iPhone XS

Posted on Sep 21, 2019 9:33 AM

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8 replies

Oct 2, 2019 12:49 PM in response to léonie

That feedback link takes me to Mac feedback not iPhone feedback.


Thanks for the answer. For me, as any new parent or pet owner can tell you, sometimes you just have to keep the camera rolling to capture what you want. And you aren’t going to want to stop/start each time junior does something adorable. But you also don’t want to share a 10 minute clip. Instead, you want to share those 3 different 5-second precious parts of the video.


I realize that always being able to revert was supposed to be an enhancement, but taking away the option to save as a new clip is extremely disruptive.

Oct 12, 2019 8:02 PM in response to brf7

I run a business where i totally rely on taking a video and "clipping" part of it to send to a specific client and then clipping a diff segment to send to someone else. so BRING BACK SAVE AS A NEW CLIP.... APPLE used to blow away android with how easy the parsing was... now it's impossible and painful. makes me want to change to a diff operating system. this new enhancement is dreadful and painful and i can no longer expediently communicate with clients... i am totally handcuffed. I agree with all the other comments on this string as well..... APPLE how can you not understand customer's needs ????

Nov 16, 2019 2:05 AM in response to brf7

Agreed

A very frustrating & time consuming loss of functionality. & of course if you can afford to wait for the trim to save, the resulting video quality has been compromised through an additional level of compression.

The only work around I have is to save the video to files (iCloud drive for example) & then you can make a non destructive trim & save it back to your iPhone photo library.

The problem is it looses the time & date etc.

Then you have to use a third party app to fix this.

Very far from ideal.

Nov 26, 2019 3:49 PM in response to brf7

I totally agree.


This is really not acceptable. A very bad bad design. Please bring back the save as new clip function. In my opinion an even better design would be to add an option in the preferences so the user can decide if she/he wants to use the "Nondestructive video editing" feature or not.


I really don't like this feature at all and I think I am not the only one.


Imagine this scenario: I have 100 videos of 20 seconds each in my phone and now the memory of my Iphone is full. One of those videos had an original length of 1 hour (or whatever). How am I supposed to know (quickly) which video is using the most space? With the previous iOS I only had to quickly look at the length of the video.


I'm having a really hard time to believe that such a bad design has been pushed out in a final version. Especially from Apple.

Sep 21, 2019 10:15 AM in response to brf7

This is supposed to be an enhancement. If we edit a video, we can always revert to the original, just like for photos.


If you want to discard the original, you have to do it just like in Photos on a Mac - export the edited version of the video from Photos and save it a s file, then delete the original version in Photos and and import the saved, trimmed file back to Photos. You can do this using the Share menu. After trimming the video, share it too Files. Then ave the shared file to Photos.


You may want to send feedback to Apple to allow us to create a a new, trimmed copy, that is not linked to the original, so we can save storage on the iPhone. The feedback form is here: Feedback - Photos - Apple

Oct 9, 2019 11:48 AM in response to léonie

I just want to note that saving a trimmed video clip to files with the share menu converts HEVC video to H.264. This re-encoding negates some of the space savings (the reason we want to permanently trim the video in the first place), may also degrade video quality slightly, and it makes sharing/saving the trimmed video clip take extra time.


Anyone who wants to trim an HEVC file and end up with a smaller HEVC file should submit iOS 13 feedback to Apple.

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Nondestructive video editing and trimming

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