How to edit a video for free in your browser: cut, crop, merge and more

What kind of video editing do you actually need?

Search for how to edit a video and you are told to download a large editing suite, learn a timeline, and set aside a weekend. That is the right answer if you are cutting a short film. It is the wrong answer if you want to chop the first ten seconds off a screen recording, join three phone clips, or shrink a file so it fits in an email.

ClipLime is not a timeline editor. There are no layers, transitions, titles or effects, and no project file to save and reopen. Instead it is a set of single-purpose tools, each one doing one job well on a video you drop onto the page. For a large share of everyday video editing, one or two of those jobs is all you need. Everything runs inside your browser using your own computer, so your video is never uploaded, and the tools are free with no watermark and no account.

This guide walks through the common edits, in the order most people need them, and says plainly when a job is beyond what these tools do.

Cut a video: trim the start, the end or the middle

Almost every edit starts with cutting. The video trimmer shows a timeline with thumbnails. Drag the two handles, or type exact times such as 1:23.45, and use the I and O keys to set the start and end at the playhead. The arrow keys step one frame at a time, so a cut can land exactly where you want it.

There are two ways to cut. Keep selection keeps only the part you marked, which is how you trim dead air from the start and end of a recording. Cut out selection removes a section from the middle and joins the rest, which is how you lose a cough, a mistake or a long pause.

Then choose how to save. Precise re-encodes so the cut lands on the exact frame. Fast copies the selection without re-encoding and finishes in seconds, keeping your original format and quality. The catch is that fast mode starts at the nearest earlier keyframe, so the start can be a fraction of a second off. For a quick trim of a long video, fast is ideal. For a frame-accurate cut, use precise.

If the video is a talking-head recording full of pauses, the silence remover can find and cut them automatically and show every cut on a timeline first. The method is in removing pauses from talking videos.

Crop and rotate: fix the shape of the frame

Cropping removes the edges of the picture. In the video cropper you drag a box over the frame, or lock it to 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 4:3, and the result is saved as an MP4 with the sound kept. One button finds black bars at the top and bottom, or the sides, and frames just the picture. That is useful for old recordings and for videos that were letterboxed by mistake.

Cropping is not the same as resizing. A crop throws away part of the picture and keeps the rest at full sharpness. If you need the whole picture inside a different shape, such as a landscape video in a vertical frame, the social video resizer fits it in instead of cutting it off. The arithmetic of choosing a shape is in aspect ratios explained. To turn a long recording into several vertical clips, see turning a long video into Shorts.

A video that plays sideways needs the rotate tool. It turns the picture 90 degrees either way, or 180, and can mirror it. Its fast mode only rewrites the rotation flag in an MP4 or MOV, so it is instant; the re-encode mode bakes the turn into the picture when you need it to work everywhere.

Merge clips into one MP4

To join clips, open the video merger, add two or more files, and drag them into order. The clips can be MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV, and you can mix them in the same merge. If the clips are different shapes, for example one landscape and one vertical, each is fitted into the output frame with black bars or a blurred background rather than stretched.

You choose the output shape: match the first clip, 1080p or 720p landscape, vertical 1080 by 1920, or square 1080 by 1080. Sound is kept from every clip, and a clip with no sound gets silence so the rest never drifts out of sync. The result is one MP4.

Honest limit: the merger joins clips end to end. There are no transitions between them, no cross-fades, and no titles. If you want a dissolve between every scene, you need a full editor.

Change speed, remove sound, grab a still or make a GIF

The speed tool makes a whole video faster or slower, from 0.25 times to 4 times. By default voices keep their natural pitch, so a sped-up tutorial does not sound like a chipmunk; switch that off if you want the effect. It speeds up the entire video, not just a section, so trim first if only part of it should change.

The mute tool removes the sound track and saves a silent copy. Because the picture is copied rather than re-encoded, quality is identical to the original and it usually takes a few seconds. If you only want the sound, Extract Audio saves it as MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG or FLAC. The steps are in extracting audio from a video.

Need a single image from a video? Extract Frames saves stills, and Video to GIF makes a short looping animation with controls for frame rate, size and loop. The settings that keep it small are in how to make a GIF from a video, and picking the exact frame is covered in saving a still frame from a video.

Make the file smaller or change its format

Editing often ends with a file that is too big to send. The video compressor re-encodes at a lower bitrate, resolution or frame rate, either from a quality preset or to an exact size in megabytes, which is handy for chat apps and email. It handles multi-gigabyte files and saves MP4 (H.264, H.265 or AV1) or WebM (VP9) depending on what your browser can encode. The longer explanation is in how to compress a video without losing visible quality, and files that are gigabytes in size are covered in compressing large video files.

If a device or app will not open your file, the video converter changes the container to MP4, WebM, MOV or MKV. When the new format can hold the existing streams, it copies them instead of re-encoding, so there is no quality loss and the job takes seconds.

A sensible order for several edits

Each tool saves a new file and then you open that file in the next tool, so the order matters for quality and speed. This sequence works well for most videos:

1. Trim first. Cutting away what you do not need makes every later step faster, because there is less video to process.
2. Crop or rotate next, while the video is still at full quality.
3. Merge your finished clips into one MP4, choosing the output shape you want.
4. Change speed or mute if needed.
5. Compress or convert last. Each re-encode loses a little detail, so do the size reduction once, at the end.

Where a tool offers a fast mode that copies streams, use it for the early steps. You only pay the quality cost of re-encoding once.

Editing an MP4 on a Mac, a PC or a phone

The tools work in current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. On a Mac you do not need to install anything beyond your browser, and on Windows the same is true. They also open MOV files from iPhones, including H.265 phone videos, which is the usual stumbling block for people who search for a free MP4 editor on Mac.

Large videos are more comfortable on a computer than a phone, because the work happens in your device's memory. A multi-gigabyte file will run, but give it a computer if you have one.

When you do need a full video editor

Be realistic about what is missing. ClipLime does not do multi-track timelines, picture-in-picture, titles and lower thirds, colour grading, transitions, stock music or effects. If your project needs those, use a desktop editor, and use these tools around it for the small jobs: trimming a raw clip before import, compressing the export, or converting a format the editor will not accept.

For most quick edits, though, a single focused tool is faster than opening a project, and nothing leaves your device.