You can definitely shrink the log file "live". SQL simply won't do it if it would cause a loss of data.

The tricky part is finding the right size to shrink it to: you don't want to shrink so much that it has to grow dynamically, but you don't want to leave it overallocated so much that it holds significant unused extra disk space. It may take a little experimentation to get the best size for each log file.