Trim Tool for Footage BEFORE Input

Any suggestions on a good tool for cutting unusable footage before importing to avoid wasting harddrive space? Started thinking about this with long drone clips of aquatic wildlife. In many cases, I've gotta keep rolling until animals surface to avoid missing that part of the shot. The result is great sequences, but A LOT of nothing in between that adds up over time to storage space - for nothing of value. I've got Wondershare - good conversion and trimming tool, but it boils everything down to 1080 on save.
Thanks - sp

Sounds like you are asking about a destructive editor to cutout just the sections you want to import. Have you tried QuickTime? It allows you to cutout what you need and save it as a clip, instructions here . 

I'd just import it all into FCP, make Favorite ranges.
Set the Browser to show only Favorites.
Export those.
Delete everything from your Browser and import your newly trimmed clips.

Or trim them up in QuickTime as previously suggested. But I think being able to see everything more clearly in FCP would be easier, and more precise.

Thanks - much appreciated. Checked it out and very easy method, but it still only allows 1080 as highest save option. Maybe there's a paid version of QT that allows 4K save of trimmed clips. I'll look into it  - share any findings there.
sp

Thanks - that's what I ended up doing. Takes more time, but does the trick. Would be great, though, if there was a down & dirty tool to do quick cuts / save of clips in original res b4 import. Thanks Again. sp
 

Not sure what you're doing in the QT player, but if you save a 4K file that's been split and sections deleted, the saved file is 4K. This maybe codec dependent, but normally this is the way it behaves for any file I've tried that the QT player can open. 

Compressor may be faster. You can set in and out points, submit it for export while setting new in and out points, repeat, rinse.

There are utilities that let you view and then select in and out points and just import those marked segments, transcoding them into a different codec at the same time if desired. Edit ready is one.

Aquaholic wrote: Any suggestions on a good tool for cutting unusable footage before importing to avoid wasting harddrive space?...long drone clips of aquatic wildlife...A LOT of nothing in between that adds up over time to storage space...

If you import the footage with "leave files in place" it does not take up any more space, assuming the files are first copied from drone to hard disk. 

As already mentioned, nothing is faster than FCP at browsing media. 

By coincidence the original designer of FCPX (Randy Ubillos) was motivated by an aquatic wildlife vacation where he had a difficult time finding the limited footage of sharks amid the material he shot.

Quicktime Player can trim video files, cut out middle sections and re-arrange segments without re-encoding the output. However, importing all files to FCP and marking favorites/rejects in the event browser is much faster than plodding through each camera file. 



If your concern is not disk space during the edit but space for archival storage after the edit, that is a possible issue. The 3rd-party tool Works4 X can trim those files, albeit with some limitations:  worx4.com