Video Trimmer

Most recordings hold a lot that nobody needs to watch. A one hour meeting might contain a five minute answer you want to send a colleague, and a phone clip of a birthday often opens with ten seconds of the floor. Keeping only the useful part makes the file smaller, quicker to upload to YouTube or WhatsApp, and far more likely to be watched to the end.

You choose a start point and an end point, and everything before and after them is removed. What remains is one continuous piece from the middle of your recording, exactly as it was filmed. This is not full editing: it will not join two clips, and it will not cut a section out of the middle and close the gap. Changing the shape of the picture, or keeping only the sound, are separate jobs.

The part you keep is not re-framed or re-sized, so the picture quality and resolution stay the same, and the sound stays matched to it. The file size falls roughly in line with the length, so keeping a third of a recording leaves about a third of the size. Your upload is never changed: you get a new, shorter file, and if it is still too heavy to send, compressing it afterwards is the next step.

This setting is not on this page. Choose your video first - the trim controls open in the editor straight afterwards, beside a preview of your file, and the Trim start box sits there.

Enter the moment you want the result to begin, in hours, minutes, seconds and hundredths. Leaving it at all zeros means no trim at the start, so the file begins at the beginning.

• All zeros - keep the file from the very start
• A specific time - skipping an intro, a countdown, silence or throat-clearing before the content begins
• Slightly before your intended point - a small margin avoids clipping the first word

Yes - always from the start of the original, written as hours, minutes, seconds and then fractions of a second. So 00:00:15.00 begins fifteen seconds in, regardless of any other trimming you have set. The matching end setting uses the same reference point, which is why the end value must be later than the start.

Both boxes sit together in the editor, which opens once you have chosen a file, so you can check one against the other before converting.

It is left out of the new file entirely, though your original is untouched and can be converted again if you cut too much. The part you keep is not degraded by trimming, so quality is unaffected.

Nothing is committed until you set the start in the editor, which you reach by choosing a file, so you can upload and look before deciding anything. One thing to watch: if you are adding a separate subtitle file, its timings still refer to the untrimmed original, so they will no longer line up once the opening is removed.

Enter the exact end point in Trim end as hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds, and your output stops right there. Times are counted from the beginning of the original video, so 00:02:30.25 ends it two and a half minutes in – useful for removing an awkward ending, or keeping a clip short enough for Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Pair it with the trim start to keep only the part you want. You will find the trim boxes in the editor, the step straight after you choose a file.

The part you keep is unaffected by the trimming itself - nothing is squeezed or degraded to make room. What you cut is simply absent from the new file, so recovering it means converting again from your original, which is worth keeping until you are happy. It is also worth allowing a moment of margin at each end, since cuts landing exactly on a word or a beat tend to feel abrupt.

If you want to experiment, the values in the editor can be changed as often as you like before you start the conversion.