Ever needed to pull a bunch of short moments out of a pile of long footage and stitch them into one video — without manually trimming and exporting each piece by hand? That was my problem: GoPro footage, 20+ clips, wanting one highlight reel out of a handful of good moments scattered across them.
Shotcut’s markers turned out to be the perfect way to mark those moments — but there’s no way to export them in bulk, so I wrote a script that closes that gap. Point it at your saved .mlt project and it reads every marked moment (points and start/stop Ranges both), figures out which source clip and timestamp each one belongs to — even across cuts — merges anything overlapping, and stitches the results into one video with crossfades (12 styles) or hard cuts. An --examine mode previews the breakdown and final duration before you render anything.
Free, MIT-licensed, no subscriptions or paid software — just Python (stdlib only) + ffmpeg.
GitHub: GitHub - CristianJianu/Shotcut-highlight2reel: Utility to extract and merge videos from Shotcut project files (.mlt), using ffmpeg; video editing; reels; gopro · GitHub
One-person side project, best-effort maintenance — bug reports/ideas welcome via Issues. Only tested on Windows 11 so far; curious if it works on macOS/Linux too.
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