You have to make a lot of sacrifices for lossless editing, so it’ll probably always be a specialized app or at least a separate tool within an all-purpose NLE. For instance, you’re limited to compatible input streams and you can only cut on specific intervals, depending on encoder settings etc.

I guess an NLE could import clips in a locked mode by default that only supports lossless operations, and you’d have to specifically enable the rest. Could be interesting.

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j1elo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Note on the specific intervals: that's where the clever optimization comes in: leave as-is (passthrough) all not affected sections of the video (basically everything) and only recode the tiny fraction that needs recoding due to the cut being set on a non-keyframe.

That one, I do believe should get more research and implementations. Currently I only know of LosslessCut's "Smart" mode, but I'd like to see other big players of the video editing space improving the state of the art in that direction for simple cuts.

	▲	Youden 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder, rather than re-encoding when starting on a B- or P- frame, could you preserve the entire GOP losslessly but make the earlier content "disappear" on playback by shifting PTS, or bundling several frames into a single frame's payload? Maybe it causes too many problems with players.