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As Hatti stated, PD isn't set up to do that task without producing the final result.
However, there are many free 3rd party tools that will cut out a section without re-encoding. Here is a site with 10 such utilities.
Thanks, this is exactly what I want to do. Now I can save short clips from large raw video files & do the real editing later in Powerdirector. This allows me to immediately delete original video files, which can be 99% unuseable.
For anyone else looking at the above mentioned utilities, I tried both Gihosoft Free Video Cutter & Free Video Cutter (the first 2 on the list). I decided on Free Video Cutter & here's my brief review:.
In "options" you set the precision which is the number of equal length increments in to which the video is divided: 10-200, default being 60. You can extract a clip that is any number of consecutive whole increments. You also have the choice to create "video thumbs". I assume that these are thumbnails of all the increments but the process of generating them is so painfully slow that I closed the program before the process could finish.
The way I use the program is to watch my raw footage & note the times of the clips I want to keep. Then in Free Video Cutter, using a precision of 200 (smallest increments), I select the start & end of the clip using the sliders which snap to boundaries of the increments. The resulting clip is a little bigger than what I want but I can do final editing PowerDirector.
Windows 7, HP Omen Pro 15, Power Director 16, Photo Director 9