Trim and Cut Video
Keep the part you want, or cut sections out, with the frames to aim at.
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or drag it here
MP4, MOV, WebM, or MKV
- Takes
- MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, and MKV. The result is always an MP4. AVI, WMV, and FLV cannot be read in a browser and are refused.
- Size
- Only the part you keep is processed, so cutting thirty seconds out of an hour-long recording costs about what cutting thirty seconds costs. Scrubbing and playback use your browser's own player on the original file and process nothing at all.
Your file never leaves your browser during processing
How it works
To trim a video, drop it onto this page, set the start and end of the part you want to keep, and save — or switch to "Remove selected" to cut sections out and join what is left. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
The video plays in your browser as it normally would, from the file on your disk, and a filmstrip of a dozen frames runs along the timeline underneath it. That strip is what makes a cut placeable by eye: the moment the camera turns, the point where someone stops talking, the gap between two takes are all visible, so you can put the boundary where it belongs rather than guessing at a timecode. Click anywhere on the strip to play from there, or type the start and end in seconds if you already know them.
You can mark as many sections as you need, and then choose what the marks mean. Keeping them takes those sections and joins them into one video in order, which is how you pull three usable answers out of a long interview. Removing them does the opposite: it deletes the marked parts and joins everything else, which is how the dead air, the false starts, or the bit where someone walks through the shot come out. The bright parts of the filmstrip are always what will end up in the file, in both modes, so the picture answers the question directly rather than making you work it out from the setting.
Both directions are the same operation underneath. "Remove these ranges" is turned into "keep the ranges between them" and then handled by one piece of code, which is what stops the two modes from disagreeing about an overlapping selection, a section that touches the start, or a selection that covers the whole file — that last one correctly leaves nothing to save, and the page says so instead of writing an empty video.
Cutting re-encodes, and the reason is worth knowing because a cut feels like it ought to be free. Compressed video stores most frames as differences from earlier ones, so a frame in the middle of a file cannot be read without decoding the frames it depends on, and the part you keep has to be written back out as a stream that stands on its own. So the result is a fresh encode rather than a copy of the original bytes: one generation of loss even though nothing else changed. Leaving the frame size on "Original" and the quality on "Balanced" keeps that cost to a minimum.
Playback and scrubbing use your browser's own player on the original file, so checking a cut before committing to it costs nothing and processes nothing. Only saving writes anything, and only the parts you kept are read.
FAQ
Can I cut a section out of the middle of a video?
Yes. Mark the section and switch to "Remove selected" — that part is deleted and what remains is joined into one video. You can mark several sections at once, which is the usual way to strip out the pauses and false starts in a recording.
Can I keep several separate parts?
Yes. Add as many sections as you need and leave the mode on "Keep selected". They are laid end to end in order, with the sound joined at the same instants as the picture.
Does trimming reduce the quality?
Slightly, because the clip has to be re-encoded rather than copied — there is no way to cut a compressed video at an arbitrary point without decoding to it first. Leaving the frame size on "Original" and the quality on "Balanced" makes the difference very hard to see.
How precise is the cut?
The time fields accept tenths of a second. A single-range trim starts from the key frame before your chosen point and drops what precedes it, so the first frame you see is a real frame rather than a smear — which is what a cut placed mid-sequence produces in tools that do not do this.
Is my video uploaded to trim it?
No. Reading, playing back, drawing the filmstrip, and writing the clip all happen in your browser, and the network counter under the tool stays at zero bytes sent throughout.
How long a video can I trim?
There is no limit set here. Only the part you keep is decoded, so pulling thirty seconds out of a two-hour recording costs about what thirty seconds costs — the length of the source barely matters, while the frame size does.
What formats can I trim?
MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, and MKV. The result is always an MP4 with H.264 video. AVI, WMV, and FLV cannot be read in a browser and are refused by name.
Can I trim just the audio out of a video?
Yes, but through a different tool: extract the audio first, then use the audio trimmer. That route avoids re-encoding the picture you were going to throw away.