Software to trim down video files before editing

All my video files that are taking up space on my hard drive could do with having the bits trimmed off and deleted to leave only the best and usable footage. Is there any way to do this to the AVCHD file and re-saving it without any loss of data/quality as an AVCHD file ?

If there is any free software that can do this I would be grateful to know.

Thanks.

Buy another hard drive and store the original as it is.

You can edit them in your camera before you formate your card.
The best may be just give up footage shooting all together... ;)

So by asking reasonable questions i should give up ?

I used to writhe in agony when I bought and filled up yet another 500GB drive. Then a Terabyte, then, 2, .... get over it, buy bigger drives, and move on. Consider yourself lucky - you're dealing with AVCHD, not ProRes or RAW! Or 4K!! (it's a big tradeoff which is regrettable too often, but unless you are shooting in controlled circumstances most of the time, AVCHD or XAVC-S is acceptable, as proven by many rewarding sales....)

We have all gone through what you are describing. Yes almost all of us gave up and bought more external hard drives. I currently have over 10 2-4 TB hard drives in a safe place as emergency backup. For me it's not worth the time to try to trim in-camera. When you get a couple thousand clips and sales improve you will agree that shooting, keywording etc etc is more important than worrying about another $100 hard drive.

hahaa try 4k raw from sony fs700.. 20min is 512gigs.

Yep, as much as the 4K FS700 quality makes me drool, my shooting style would bankrupt me or go nuts trying to do what Marbury is considering. (Immediately edit clips to losslessly render only the good bits) I'm a pretty wasteful shooter - for every good clip I have many many bad ones. And with not enough time to go through it all the Terabytes are piling up. Can't wait for winter....

I also was concerned about the untrimmed footage taking up space; even though I agree hard drives are relatively cheap. Trimming in-camera is of course unpractical so this is my workflow to get rid of it to leave just the usable footage:

After I've worked on and rendered the footage, I use project manager in Premier Pro to save a project with only the "bits" I've used and to discard everything else.
Project>Project Manager select "create new trimmed project" select your hard drive in "project destination"

I now have a trimmed project as a neat package in a named, stand-alone folder with all the "raw" clips, workings and any jpgs used with mattes etc. all saved on an external hard drive and off the computer. I have about 100 to 200 clips in each project - as I find any more than this can slow things down - particularly if the warp stabilizer has been used a lot.

Each hard drive is duplicated and one is stored off-site.

I then delete the original project and files.

I think I prefer cloud backup. The price is reasonable and more peace of mind.