How to edit a video
- Choose your video. It appears in the preview, and the whole of it sits on the timeline as one part.
- Play it, or drag the playhead, to find the places you want to cut. Press Split (or S) to cut the timeline at the playhead.
- Click a part to select it. Delete part removes it, Earlier and Later move it (or drag it along the timeline), and the yellow handles trim its start and end.
- Add another clip or a photo at the playhead if you want one.
- Crop, rotate, change the colour or speed, add text and fades in the panels beside the video. The preview shows each change at once.
- Choose how to save it and press Export video. What you saw in the preview is what you get.
Cutting out the middle of a video
A trim keeps one stretch of a video. Often the bit you want gone is in the middle: a wrong turn, a phone call, someone walking in front of the camera. Split the timeline at the start and at the end of that bit, select the piece between the two cuts and delete it. The parts on either side join without a gap, and you can do this as many times as you like. Made a mistake? Undo (Ctrl+Z) steps back through every edit.
Crop for Reels, Shorts, TikTok and YouTube
| Where it goes | Shape | Choose |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, WhatsApp Status | Tall, 9:16 | 9:16 Reels, Shorts |
| YouTube, a TV, a laptop screen | Wide, 16:9 | 16:9 YouTube |
| Instagram feed post | Portrait, 4:5 | 4:5 Instagram |
| Profile videos, square posts | Square, 1:1 | 1:1 Square |
Cropping cuts away the edges, so a wide video cropped to 9:16 keeps a tall slice of the middle. Drag the box to follow what matters (a face, the speaker) before you export. If the whole wide picture must stay, leave the crop off: phones show a wide video in a tall feed with bars above and below.
Your video stays on your device
Most online video editors upload your video to their servers, then make you wait, sign up or pay to download it, often with a watermark. Here nothing is uploaded. The preview is your browser playing your own file, and the export runs in this tab. There is no account, no watermark and no limit on how many videos you edit. Phone videos carry the place they were filmed; that location is not copied into the exported file.
Good to know
- Everything that changes the picture means a fresh encode, so exporting takes longer than a fast trim. To only cut the start and end, the trim tool does it in seconds without re-encoding.
- The finished video has the frame rate of the first video you opened; added clips are brought to it.
- Too big to send? Run the result through the video compressor to fit WhatsApp or email limits, or make a looping clip with video to GIF.
- A format your browser cannot play (some MKV, AVI or HEVC files on Windows) can still be edited by times, but without a preview. Converting it first with the video converter gives you the preview.
The engine behind this tool
Video and sound are processed by FFmpeg, the open-source engine behind most of the world's video software, compiled to run inside your browser as ffmpeg.wasm. It is downloaded from this site (about 31 MB) the first time you use a video or audio tool, and your browser keeps it for next time. FFmpeg and ffmpeg.wasm are free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later; their source code is at github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm.