Trim a video
Cut a clip out of a recording by choosing where it starts and ends.
Drop a clip to start
Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Recordings start before the thing you wanted and end after it. A screen recording opens with a hand reaching for the mouse, a phone clip ends with the ground rushing past as the arm drops, and a meeting recording has four minutes of people saying hello. Trimming is the fix, and it is the most common thing anyone wants to do to a video that is otherwise fine.
The container is kept, and that has a consequence worth knowing: when nothing else about the picture changes, the encoded frames are copied across rather than decoded and re-encoded. A trimmed MP4 is the frames you kept, unchanged — so trimming here is lossless and nearly instant, where a tool that re-encodes costs you both quality and a wait.
The result plays in the page before you download it, because a video edit is something you check by watching. Drop several files in and the same start and end apply to all of them, which suits a batch of takes from one session.
Step by step
- 1Drop in the video.
- 2Set where the clip starts and where it ends.
- 3Press Trim, watch it, then download.
Questions
Does trimming reduce the quality?
No. Nothing is re-encoded when only the length changes — the frames you keep are the frames that were there.
Why is it so much faster than compressing?
Because nothing is decoded. Trimming copies the existing frames across; compressing has to rebuild every one of them.
Can I cut a piece out of the middle?
Not in one pass. Keep the part before it, keep the part after it, and join the two with the join tool.