I want to chop a little off the front and a little off the end and otherwise leave the video unchanged.  I don’t want to change the format, the resolution, the compression, or anything — I just want to produce a video which is the same as the original but with a bit chopped off the beginning and end.

I’ve spent two days for a tool that will do this easily (or at all!) on either Windows or Linux.  I started out with free tools, and when none of them panned out moved onto the ones that cost money.  The two closest possibilities I’ve found are Pinnacle VideoSpin and Adobe Premiere Elements.  VideoSpin refuses to export the edited video at the same resolution as the original — it insists on shrinking it down, and I can’t figure out how to convince it not to.  Furthermore, the video produced by VideoSpin is about twice as big as the original, so it’s obviously not preserving encoding or compression.

Premiere Elements offers many different output formats but offers no guidance about which one to choose.  Furthermore, all of the combinations of export settings I chose seem to produce videos that are humongous compared to the original.

So, can anybody offer any useful suggestions for how to do what I’m trying to do?