How to Cut and Trim a Video Quickly (4 Easy Methods)

Summary: Looking for how to cut & trim your videos? No worries. Here in this guide, we will share with you 4 practical methods to cut or trim your videos effortlessly on desktop computers, mobile devices, and online.

Video cutting and trimming is one of those basic editing skills you end up using all the time. Anytime you want your footage to look cleaner, tighter, and more watchable, you will probably need to cut something out.

For example, after you’ve put your clips together, you may want to remove the boring parts or messy moments. If you are taking one section from a video and adding it into another, you will need to trim away everything you do not want. And if you are posting to social media, you might need to split a long video into smaller parts simply because of the time limit.

If any of this sounds familiar, don’t worry. In this post, I will walk you through 4 easy methods you can use. Before we jump in, let's quickly clear up one common confusion about cutting and trimming, so you can choose the right video cutter or trimmer faster.

What Does It Mean to Cut or Trim a Video

In everyday use, people often say "cut" and "trim" interchangeably, and that is totally fine. Most of the time, both simply mean removing unwanted parts from a video. Still, in video editing apps, you may see a few different options. Here is a quick way to understand them:

• Trim: remove unwanted footage from the beginning and or end of a clip, like cutting off the awkward start.
• Cut: remove a section from the middle of a video, then join the remaining parts together.
• Split: break a long video into multiple smaller clips, without deleting anything.

No matter which one you need, trim, cut, or split, we will walk you through the easiest ways to do it below.

How to Cut and Trim a Video on Windows and Mac

The tool we need: VideoProc Converter AI

If you want a simple way to trim the start or end of a clip, cut out unwanted parts in the middle, or split a long video into smaller pieces, VideoProc Converter AI is a great option. It is fast, beginner friendly, and most importantly, it lets you cut and trim videos without turning the whole process into a complicated editing project. See some of its highlight features:

• Flexible: cut any unwanted part(s) from ends or middle of your video.
• Batch cut or trim multiple videos in one go, which is a big time saver.
• No visible qulaity loss; Also support lossless trim/cut with Auto Copy.
• Up to 47x faster speed, utilizing the level-3 GPU acceleration tech.
• 29-quick editing tools: rotate, crop, subtitle, stabilize, and more.
• All-in-one: convert, compress, download, and AI-enhance, etc.

So why not free download it now, and follow the steps below to make the cutting and trimming much more easily?

Step 1. Import Your Video

Install and open VideoProc Converter AI, then click Video Converter on the home screen. Click +Video to import a file, or +Video Folder if you want to process multiple clips.

Step 2. Set the Output Format

At the bottom of the interface, choose an output format. If you want the fastest export and minimal quality loss, it is best to choose the same format and codec as the original video.

Step 3. Cut Your Video

Click on the Cut icon to open a new panel. Here you can select multiple segments you want to keep, not just one. The unselected part(s) will be removed off. Hit Done. VideoProc Converter AI will automatically merge the selected parts into one video. This is perfect when your video has several good moments, but also boring or messy parts in between.

How to Trim Your Video

After importing your video, click Toolbox, then select Trim. On the Trim screen, drag the green sliders to set the Start Time and End Time, then confirm. This is the best option when you simply want to remove the beginning or ending of a clip.

Step 4. Export Without Re Encoding

Turn on Auto Copy on the right side of the interface. This helps you avoid unnecessary re encoding, which can reduce quality and slow down the export. Hit RUN to process your video, or all videos if you imported multiple files.

How to Trim a Video on iPhone and iPad

The tool we need: iOS Photo App

Well, as you can see from the title, with this built-in tool in iOS, Photo app, we can only trim a video, no cutting feature. And for all mobile devices, iOS and Android, there is nearly no application that can do that. Probably because we have missed some ones that they can. And we will update it in this guide as soon as we find one. If you have some applications to share, you can also tell us.

Now, let's take a look at how to use the Photo app trimming our videos.

Step 1. Find the video file in your Photo app, which you would like to trim. And then click the Edit menu in the right upper corner of the screen. Then you will be on the editing page of Photo app.

Step 2. Now move the sliders on both sides to localize the frames which you plan to keep.

Step 3. Tap the Done button to save the chosen frames. But Apple is thoughtful. There will be another two options popping up, Save Video and Save Video as New Clip. We would sincerely recommend you choose Save Video as New Clip, so you can keep both the original clip and the changed one.

Besides trimming, Photo app can also do adjusting exposure, changing vibrance, adding filters, cropping size, and more.

Tip: For more solutions to how to cut out parts of a video on iPhone, you can jump to this specific page of ours.

How to Trim a Video on Android

The tool we need: Google Photo App

Mostly, the Google Photo app is installed on every Android phone. If you cannot find it, you can go to the Google Play store for downloading and installation.

And here are the detailed steps about how to use Google Photo app for trimming a video,

Step 1. Open the Google Photos App, and in the Albums section, select the Videos album.

Step 2. Tap on the video file which you would like to edit.

Step 3. Click on the Edit icon, located at the bottom.

Step 4. Adjust the start and end slider to cover the video frames which you want to keep.

Step 5. Tap on Save copy menu in the top right corner of the screen.

Besides trimming, the Google Photo app can also help you with video stabilizing, rotating, and more.

How to Cut and Trim a Video Online

The tool we need: Clideo

Online tools have a large audience base because it allows user no downloading and installing any application. It is quite convenient. And in this part, the tool that we recommend belongs to the website of Clideo. Clideo is a platform full of a bunch of world-class online software for audio and video files. And here what we need is its easy-to-use tool, Cut.

Step 1. Go to its homepage on your computer, and choose the Cut tool.

Step 2. Then import the video file saved in local, Google Drive, Dropbox, or even an online video with a single URL. It will take a while for uploading the file to its server, depending on the file size and network speed.

Tip: Almost every online tool has its unique limit on the file size. For Clideo, the maximum number is 500MB. If your video is bigger than 500MB, we would sincerely recommend taking VideoProc Converter AI as an alternative option.

Step 3. After the file imported, it will lead you to another page, where there is a green box on the timeline. You can decide what period the green box covers, by moving its head and tail. Then take a look at the options on the right side of the page. There are two major menus, Extract Selected and Delete Selected. Extract Selected means trim the video and Delete Selected means cut the video.

People Also Ask About Cutting Video

1. How to Cut Videos in Windows Media Player

First of all, Windows Media Player does not provide any video editing skills at all. But if you would like to use it to cut a part of the video, some third-party plugins can help with that. And SolveigMM WMP Trimmer plugin would be a common one of them.

Step 1. Download and install SolveigMM WMP Trimmer plugin into Windows Media Player. You can download it here.

Step 2. When the installation completes, the plugin features would display on the bottom of the Windows Media Player.

Step 3. Move the slider to a position of the video, which would be the head of the cut video, and then click on Add marker. Operate in the same way to mark its tail position.

Step 4. Now you can thumb up or thumb down the marked section, with the corresponding icons. A thumb-up means keep this section, and a thumb-down means cut it out from the video.

If you would like to cut parts of a video, not just one, you can just do as step 3 and step 4 multiple times.

Step 5. Lastly, just click on the Trim button to start the processing.

2. How to Trim a Video in iMovie

Step 1. Launch the iMovie application on your Mac computer, and create a new project to import the video file that you plan to trim.

Step 2. Drag the file to the timeline for editing.

Step 3. Move the play head to the position where you want to cut. And then right-click it to choose the Split Clip option. It will just make the video two pieces. If you want to make it several sections, just do the same way in the right positions.

Step 4. Choose the section that you plan to remove from the video, and right-click on it to choose the Delete option. The section will just be removed from the video.

For more information about how iMovie edits videos, you can follow this guide of ours on iMovie unbiased review.

3. How to Trim a Video in QuickTime

Step 1. Run it on your Mac computer and open the video file you want to trim.

Step 2. Choose Edit, and then Trim. Now you can just move the yellow sliders to find the head and tail of the section which you want to keep.

Step 3. Click the Trim button to get it done.

4. How to Cut Videos in Adobe After Effects

Step 1. Move the play head to the head of the video section which you want to remove from the whole video, click Edit in the menu, and choose Split Layer feature.

Step 2. Move the play head to the tail of the section, and do the same thing above.

Step 3. Click the section that you would like to remove, choose Edit from the menu, and then click the Clear to get the whole job done.

5. How to Cut Videos in Shotcut

Step 1. Import the video file into Shotcut, and drag it to the timeline.

Step 2. Move the play head to the start of the section which you want to remove, and press the shortcut key I.

Step 3. Move the play head to the end of the section, and press the key O. And now the section would be isolated from the whole video.

Step 4. Choose the section, right-click on it, and find the Remove. Click it and the section would be removed.

If you feel many interests in Shotcut, you can refer to this ultimate review guide of ours, which will tell you everything about Shotcut.

The Bottom Line

If your mission is cutting out a part of a video on your iPhone, iPad, or Android devices, you can simply finish it with their built-in tools, Photo app and Google Photo app correspondingly; and if you plan to do it on Windows or Mac computers, we would sincerely recommend VideoProc Converter AI as the better option, even though there is an online way that we have listed above and works. Because there are some less obvious but significant reasons. Here is a handy list for you to check them out.

Why not free download VideoProc Converter AI and give it a try now?