How to Trim or Cut Using an Online Video Editor

My friend said my video’s intro was a minute too long. I had shared with her a 6 minute video that I was going to post to my YouTube channel. She felt viewers would close my video in the first minute if I didn’t shorten my intro. So, I removed the least important parts of my intro. To do that I used an online video cutter.

A video cutter, also called a video trimmer, is an editing tool to remove sections of a video. Trimming refers to removing sections from the head or tail of a video. Cutting refers to removing parts in the middle of a video. Since people use the two words interchangeably, to keep it simple, I use the cutting below.

Why cut your video?

There are three common situations when you need to cut your video.

1. Remove dead time at the beginning and end

There’s a few seconds of dead time between the start of recording and when we start speaking. There is also some dead time in the end, between when we stop talking and end recording. To improve the video, remove the dead time.

2. Delete mistakes

If you misspoke in the video or there was a mistake while recording, cut out those sections of the video.

3. Remove the boring parts

If something in the video takes up too much time and isn’t interesting, cut it out. An example of a boring part in a video: showing a progress bar or loading screen.

Now that we know the reasons to cut a video, what features do we look for in a video cutter?

Features to look for in a video cutter

1. Cut out parts at any time in the video

Most video trimmers cut just the ends of the video, but the good ones let you cut anywhere in between too.

2. Cut with frame-level precision

When cutting a video, you don’t want to cut out in the middle of a word or in the middle of an action. You want to cut cleanly in between words or actions. For that, you need a cutter that has frame-level precision.

3. Easy to adjust start and end times

A video cutter should provide both a slider mechanism to coarsely adjust the start and end time, and a numerical input for fine adjustment.

Klip is an online video cutter that has these three features.

Steps to cut a video

Here are the steps to use Klip to trim a video.

1. Create account on Klip

Sign in is needed as the video is uploaded online. Signing in establishes your ownership of the video. You can edit the video, delete it, share link, etc.

2. Upload video

Open the Klip dashboard and click the Upload video file button. This opens a webpage where you can upload the video file to cut.

3. Open the trim/cut tool

After upload, the video will open on a new webpage. Below the video, you'll see a scissors icon. Click it to open the Video Editing Tools menu. On this menu select Trim/Cut to open a new webpage where you can cut the video.

4. Adjust video section

On the Cut tool webpage, adjust the slider handles below the video, to adjust the from and to times of the video section. You can also adjust the times through the numerical input boxes.  

5. Add more sections

To add more video sections, click Add Part. To preview the output video, you can click the play button on the video.

6. Finish

After you're done adding all the sections you need, click Finish. In a few moments, the finished video is ready.

Summary

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material. - Michelangelo

Like Michelangelo, who liberated sculptures from marble blocks, you too can liberate a good video from a raw recording, by cutting the superfluous material.

With the Klip video cutter, you can do precision cuts and join them, to produce a shorter and better video.