Trim a video

Give a start time and an end time and get back only what is between them. The trim runs on your own machine — which matters more here than on most tools, because the clips people cut are usually the ones they would not hand to a website.

    • Where it runs

      A video is read in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.

    • No queue, no account

      It starts the moment you drop the file, and it never asks who you are.

    • No watermark

      What comes out is the file you made, with nothing added to it.

    How it works

    1. Drop a video onto the box above, or press it to choose one.
    2. Type the second the clip should start at, and the second it should end.
    3. Press Trim. The work happens on your own machine.
    4. Download the shortened video.

    Why trimming re-encodes and rotating does not

    A video is not a row of independent pictures. Most frames describe only what changed since the last one, and they hang off a keyframe that carries a complete image. Cutting at an arbitrary second usually lands between keyframes, so the frames after the cut refer backwards to something that is no longer in the file.

    The honest fix is to decode from the last keyframe and encode again, which is what happens here. It costs time on a long clip and one generation of quality, and it is the reason trimming takes seconds where rotating takes milliseconds. Tools that promise an instant lossless cut are either snapping your start time to the nearest keyframe without saying so, or leaving broken frames at the front.

    Times are in seconds, not frames

    People know a video is "about eight seconds in". Nobody knows they want frame 197, and the frame rate is whatever the camera felt like — 29.97 is still common enough to make frame arithmetic a trap.

    Decimals work: 8.5 is halfway through the ninth second. If the end is left empty the clip runs to its own end, which is the usual case when you only want to remove a slow start.

    What the result keeps

    The sound is cut to match, so the two stay in step. Subtitle tracks and alternate audio are not carried across — this is a trimmer rather than an editor, and quietly dropping a second language would be worse than saying so here.

    The output is an MP4 whatever went in, because MP4 is the container that plays everywhere. If you need the original container back, the conversion pages will do that in a second afterwards.

    Trim a video: common questions

    Is my video uploaded?

    No. The trim runs inside your browser and the file never leaves your device. That is worth more here than on most tools — screen recordings, medical scans and family video are exactly the things people would rather not hand to a website in exchange for a download link.

    Is trimming lossless?

    No, and no browser tool can make it so at an arbitrary second. Cutting between keyframes means the frames after the cut have nothing to refer back to, so the clip is decoded and encoded again. At default quality the difference is not visible, but it is a real generation of loss.

    How long a video can I trim?

    There is no limit written into the page, but there is one in your machine. The whole file is held in memory while it is worked on, so a phone with a two-hour 4K recording will run out before a laptop does. If it fails, that is what happened.

    Can I cut a piece out of the middle and join the rest?

    Not here. That is two cuts and a join, and joining two clips only works cleanly when they share a codec, a resolution and a frame rate — otherwise it needs a full re-encode of both halves. Doing it badly is worse than not offering it.

    Does the sound stay in sync?

    Yes. The audio is trimmed to the same start and end as the picture rather than being cut separately, which is the mistake that produces a clip where the voice runs ahead of the mouth by a growing margin.

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