Cut out part of a video

How to use it#

1. Drop a video onto the box above, or click it to choose one.
2. Play the video to where a part to remove starts and press Add a section. Drag the edges of its box on the timeline under the video, drag the box to move it, or type From and To.
3. Add a section for each part to remove. Press a box, or pick it in the list of sections, to change it, and remove one with its cross.
4. The video is cut as soon as a section is set. Play it in the preview, then download it.

How the parts are joined#

A video is stored as a full picture every second or two, called a keyframe, with only the changes in between. The part after each cut usually starts between two keyframes, so it cannot simply be copied onto the part before: its first frames would have nothing to be drawn from. A tool that copies instead has to move the cut to the nearest keyframe, which can leave up to a couple of seconds of what you meant to remove, or take out some of what you meant to keep.

So the picture is encoded again from start to end, at a high quality and never at more than the bitrate of the original, and the join lands on the frame you set. It loses a little detail, which at this quality is very hard to see, and it takes about as long as compressing the video would. An HEVC video, as an iPhone records, stays HEVC where the browser can make it and becomes H.264 where it cannot, and a video shot at more than 60 frames a second comes back at 60.

The sound is cut at the same points. Where it is encoded again, it rises and falls over a hundredth of a second at each join so it does not click; where it is copied as it was, the cut lands within a few hundredths of a second. The result keeps the format you gave it, and the date, place, and phone model a video records are kept too.

Several sections, the start, and the end#

To take the start or the end off, trim video is the quicker way: it keeps one part, from a start to an end. Here, a cut from 0 or one that runs to the end of the video works too, and does the same.

Mark every part you want gone and they are all taken out in one pass, so the picture is encoded only once however many there are. The timeline under the video shows the sound, which makes pauses and loud moments easy to find. A video with no sound shows a flat line there, and its sections are marked the same way. Sections that overlap are taken out as one. To put clips together rather than take parts out, use merge videos.