Trim Video

Most trims are one of two jobs. Either you want a short piece out of a long recording, such as one answer from an interview or the goal from a full match, or you want the whole thing minus something: a false start, a moment where someone walked into the shot, a stretch of silence. The Selected range setting covers both, and the start and end times mean the same thing either way: they mark the part you are talking about.

Compressed video does not store every frame as a full picture. It stores a complete frame, called a keyframe, every so often, and between them it records only what changed. That is why video files are as small as they are, and it is also why cutting is less simple than it looks. A cut that starts between two keyframes has no full picture to start from.

Frame-exact, the default, solves this by encoding the kept part again. The cut lands precisely on the time you typed, fades become possible, and the output format can change. The cost is time, plus a second round of encoding, which is rarely visible.

Fast (no re-encode) copies the video stream as it is. It finishes much sooner and keeps the original quality bit for bit, but the cut can only begin at a keyframe. Depending on how the video was recorded, that can be a few seconds before the time you asked for. Fast mode is the right choice for long recordings where a few seconds either way does not matter, such as cutting the first minutes off a stream or a lecture.

Phones and cameras place keyframes at different intervals, and some screen recorders place them far apart. If a fast cut starts noticeably early, simply run it again in frame-exact mode.

Fade in and Fade out take values from 0 to 10 seconds in half-second steps. A fade in rises from black and silence at the start; a fade out goes to black and silence at the end. Zero, the default, gives a hard cut. Even half a second softens an abrupt start, and a second or two at the end makes a clip feel finished rather than chopped. Fades require frame-exact mode, because they change the picture of every frame they cover.

Output format keeps the source format by default. Switch it to MP4 when the trimmed clip goes to someone else or to a website, since MP4 plays nearly everywhere. MOV, WebM and MKV are there for editing apps, web pages and archives that expect them. To change only the format without cutting, use the Video Converter page instead.

Remove audio saves the trimmed part without sound, which is useful for background loops, silent product shots and clips you will put music under later. If you need only the sound of a section, Video to Audio has its own start and end fields and saves the result as MP3, WAV and other audio formats.

Phone videos are usually MP4 or MOV and trim cleanly in either mode. iPhone clips often use HEVC; keeping Output format on the source format preserves that, while switching to MP4 makes the trimmed clip easier to open on Windows and older Android phones. Vertical clips stay vertical; trimming never changes the frame.

Camcorder and camera files such as MTS, M2TS and MXF are accepted as input. These formats are often awkward in everyday players, so saving the trimmed part as MP4 at the same time saves a separate conversion.

Screen recordings and game captures tend to be long, and the interesting part is often a few minutes in the middle. Frame-exact mode is safer here, since some recording tools place keyframes far apart. If the recording is larger than 95 MB, cut it into pieces in a desktop editor first, or record shorter takes next time.

Recordings of calls and meetings usually need the opposite treatment: keep almost everything and remove the small talk at the start and the goodbyes at the end. One pass with Keep it, a start time just after the small talk and an end time just before the goodbyes, does the job. If what you need afterwards is a written record rather than a video, Audio to Text turns the kept part into a transcript.

Leave a little breathing room. Cutting exactly on the first word of a sentence often clips the sound, because speech starts slightly before it is clearly audible. Starting half a second earlier and ending half a second later makes a clip feel natural. Pair that with a short fade and the edges disappear.

Work from the original file whenever you can. Each time a video is encoded it loses a little, so trimming a copy that was already compressed for messaging gives a weaker result than trimming the original recording. When a single long video needs several separate clips, run the original once per clip with different times rather than cutting a cut.

Check the result before sharing it. Play the first and last seconds of the trimmed file, since that is where mistakes show. If you need the same cut points on several recordings, such as a set of lectures with identical intros, put them in one batch; every file in the batch is cut at the same times.