You can do some limited movie editing in camera on the Nikon D5500. Limited editing is emphasized here. You can trim frames from the start of a movie and clip off frames from the end, and that’s it.
To eliminate frames from the start of a movie, take these steps:
Display your movie in single-image view. Tap the playback icon.
You can also press OK to begin playback.
When you reach the first frame you want to keep, pause the movie by tapping the screen or pressing the Multi Selector down.
The onscreen display updates to show you the controls.
Press the i button or tap the i symbol at the bottom of the screen.
You see the menu options.
Select Choose Start/End Point.
You will see these options.
Select Start Point.
You’re returned to the playback screen, which now sports a couple additional symbols. First, you see two yellow markers on the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. The left marker indicates the start point; the right marker, the end point. You also see an AE‐L/AF‐L symbol.
Press the Multi Selector up or tap the scissors symbol (lower‐right corner of the frame) to lop off all frames that came before the current frame.
Now you see these options. To preview the movie, select Preview and press OK; after the preview plays, you’re returned to the menu screen.
To preserve your original movie and save the trimmed one as a new file, choose Save as New File and press OK.
Alternatively, you can opt to overwrite the existing file, but you can’t get the original file back if you do.
A message appears, telling you that the trimmed movie is being saved. During playback, edited files are indicated by a little scissors icon that appears in the upper‐left corner of the screen.
To instead trim footage from the end of a film, follow the same steps but this time pause playback on the last frame you want to keep in Step 3. Then, in Step 6, select Choose End Point instead of Choose Start Point.
You can trim an already trimmed movie, by the way. So you can go through the steps once to set a new start point and a second time to set a new end point. Or, if you prefer, you can trim files from both the beginning and end of a movie in one pass. After you take Step 6, press the AE-L/AF‐L button or tap the corresponding icon at the bottom of the screen.
The marker at the right end of the progress bar turns yellow, indicating that you can now rewind the movie to the frame that you want to use as the end of the video. You can keep tapping or pressing the AE‐L/AF‐L control to toggle between the start/end point controls on the progress bar. To finalize the edit, press the Multi Selector up or tap the scissors symbol.