Trim Video

Making the cut

1. Drop the recording on the page, or press Choose a video, and give the filmstrip a moment to draw. It samples somewhere between six and sixteen frames across the whole clip, usually enough to see where the real content starts.
2. Set the range with the two handles, or type into Start and End if you already know the times. Play on the film runs just that range and stops at the end of it, or loops if Loop the selection is ticked. Want a second piece? + Add segment starts another range at the playhead, and the cards underneath let you reorder them and set what happens at each join.
3. Press Trim, or Join when there is more than one segment. A copy finishes almost at once; a re-encode shows a progress bar with a Cancel beside it. The result plays in the same frame behind Original | Trimmed, and Download saves it.

About this tool

Every recording carries the bit before it starts and the bit after it ends. Trimming a video is usually about those two edges. Drag the Trim start handle in from the left, pull Trim end back from the right, and Play on the film runs only what survives between them.

When a handle isn't fine enough there are Start and End boxes below the timeline. They take a timecode the way you would write one by hand, and a bare number of seconds does the same job. Whatever you type is clamped to the length of the clip, and the two markers refuse to come closer than a tenth of a second to each other. Hovering along the timeline pops a small frame from that point with its time underneath, which beats scrubbing the player to find a cut.

One video can give you more than one piece. Press + Add segment and a new range starts at the playhead, running up to the next piece you already kept or to the end of the clip. Segments show up as numbered bands on the timeline and as cards beneath it; drag a card by its grip, or press the grip for Move up and Move down, to change the order they play in. Play joined runs them back to back on the original player, which is how you check the joins before committing to an export. With more than one segment, Trim becomes Join.

What happens on export depends on what you changed. A single segment that still begins at zero is a copy: the video track is lifted out of your file and dropped into a new container without an encoder touching it, which stays quick even on a long recording, and the chip on the film says which path you are on before you press anything. Move the start off zero, or keep more than one segment, and every frame goes back through the encoder at high quality so the first frame is the exact one you chose.

The extension is decided by the codec inside the file rather than by the name it arrived with. A VP8 or VP9 clip comes back as a .webm and everything else, H.264 off a phone included, as an .mp4, named after the original with -trimmed on the end. Joining segments also re-times the result to 30 frames a second, which halves the frame rate of a 60 fps clip. A plain trim leaves the frame rate alone.

Good to know

• The copy path is narrow. It needs a single segment whose start is still sitting at zero, and nudging that handle by a hundredth of a second sends the whole clip back through the encoder, because a cut that falls between keyframes can't be made by copying packets.
• Play joined shows you hard cuts, always. The transitions you set between segments are drawn during the export only, so the preview confirms your timing without showing you the crossfade.
• The whole result is assembled in memory before Download appears, so a very long or very large recording can run a phone out of memory part-way through a re-encode.