If you don't mind me asking: why the detour?

Let me give a couple of examples. I have numbers of audio files taken in the field capturing birdsong. The birds may only have co-operated for 6 seconds of the 20 minute wav file so I want to crop off and discard the unusable parts, save the usable part in the original format and later use it in a number of Vegas projects.

Similarly I have lengthy takes where at some stage someone has planted themselves in front of the camera but there is a good 6 seconds I want to use and reuse in Vegas projects. Rather than clog up my disc space with content that will never be used I would like to crop it down to the usable bits but without loss of quality.

I could crop them in Vegas but then (I believe) I could only save or export them in a veg format whereas I may want to do other things with them as well. Also I don't want to lose the metadata from the original file.

I know there are various programs that will crop particular file formats in a non-lossy manner. I was wondering if anyone had advice on a one-size-fits-all solution.

VideoRedo

Musicvid - you consistently give such good advice I shall go away and try it immediately.

Since the version 6 release, I use it more often than Handbrake. 4k x265? Heck yeah. I doubt if it will save all metadata.

You can trim and save the video, audio, or both without recompression, but not crop.

Hmmm...in Vegas, audio is totally doable: just export as wave, aiff, flac, sony wave64, or even Windows Media Audio. Like this:

It's lossless.

Video - not so much. Not unless you're using mpeg 2 encoded video, which can be rendered without re-compressing it.

Edit:

Oh, what Musicvid said! :)

YW, Video_flaneur! :)