Hey all,
Instead of using QuickTime player for mac or whatever the equivalent is in windows, the files can just be joined and not transcoded with resulting loss of quality.
This application LosslessCut is a fancy wrapper for ffmeg, and it just joins the files and leaves the quality as the original.
I was merging 77gb of 4k60 gopro today and iMovie took 70 minutes (on a new apple silicon macbook pro) to do the job. Losslesscut did the job in 2 minutes and left the original quality.
Maybe this can be the mind blower for someone else as it was for me.
The previous version of this post was marked as spam. It isn’t spam. I have no affiliation with the company. I just wanted to save someone else the hours of time joining movies takes using the normally recommended methods. Sheesh