First of all, yes, I know that .mp4 videos are lossy.
Many of them contain annoying unwanted stuff in the beginning or end, which I neither want to see nor want to take up storage space on my disks.
But if I were to import the .mp4 file into Premiere Pro, cut out those parts, and then re-encode this, would I not get "one generation down" and thus lose quality, since the .mp4 file is lossy to begin with and of course the new copy encodes once again the already lossy source, causing the "Xerox effect" of losing information? Actually, I can answer that question myself: yes, exactly this happens. I've ruined (at least to my brain/eyes) many videos this way in the past, because as I watch them, I keep thinking about how I could be watching a little bit sharper version, had I not edited it in this manner.
But maybe the MP4 format is smarter than that? Maybe it has some sort of special way in which it keeps the original encoding, but merely "cuts out" the parts which I cut out in the video editor, and then do not re-encode the whole data but only kind of a "wrapper" around them, so to speak, so that the original encoding of the video is still there, but certain parts have been removed and thus the file becomes smaller?
Is this somehow possible?
(Man, I can't wait for lossless video to become the norm...)
