How to cut, trim and join videos without installing anything

Drop your video into the Localvert video editor and it appears on the timeline as one block. Move the playhead to the spot you want to cut — click the ruler, or use the arrow keys to step one frame at a time (Shift + arrow jumps a second) — and press S or the Split button. The block becomes two clips.

To remove a section, split at its start and at its end, click the piece in the middle and press Delete. The clips after it slide left automatically, so there is never a gap.

When you only need to shorten the beginning or end of a clip, drag its left or right edge on the timeline. Trimming is non-destructive: the original file is untouched, so you can drag the edge back out later to restore what you cut.

A good cut usually lands just after someone finishes a sentence or right before an action starts. Step frame by frame near the cut point to find the exact moment.

Add more files with the + button in the media panel or by dropping them onto the editor; each one is added to the end of the timeline. Drag clips left or right to change their order.

If the videos have different shapes — a vertical phone clip and a horizontal camera clip, for example — the output uses the shape of the first clip (or the aspect ratio you choose in the Canvas tab), and other clips fill that frame from the center. Check the preview at each join so nothing important is cropped away.

Space plays and pauses, S splits at the playhead, Delete removes the selected clip, Home and End jump to the start or end, and Ctrl+Z undoes the last change (Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes it). Every edit can be undone, including trims and reorders.

Exporting creates a new MP4 (H.264 video, AAC audio). Because the frames are encoded again, the result is not a bit-for-bit copy of the original, but at 1080p the difference is very hard to see. Pick the resolution your footage was recorded at; exporting a 720p clip at 1080p makes the file bigger without adding detail.

The editor works on your device using your browser's built-in video encoder, so the speed depends on your computer and nothing is uploaded. If you only need to cut one piece out of a single video and shrink it for sending, Compress video can trim and compress in one step.