Windows has had three different built-in answers to “cut this video” over the years, and which one you have depends on your version and on what the Microsoft Store has updated behind your back. Movie Maker is gone. The Photos app has a trimmer. Clipchamp ships with Windows 11. And there are two routes that do not depend on any of them: a browser tab, and FFmpeg for anyone comfortable with a command line.
This is what each one actually does, in order from least to most capable.
The Photos app: Trim, and only Trim
On Windows 10, and on Windows 11 if you still have the version now called Photos Legacy, opening a video gives you an Edit & Create menu with a Trim option:
- Open the video in Photos.
- Choose Edit & Create, then Trim.
- Two handles appear on a timeline. Drag them inward to set the start and end you want to keep.
- Save a copy. The original is left untouched.
That is the entire feature. There is one range and it defines what survives, so the tool can shorten a clip from the ends and nothing else. It also re-encodes on save; the copy is a new file at whatever settings Photos picks, not a byte copy of the original.
The newer Photos app on Windows 11 has had its video editing handed over to Clipchamp, so the Trim button may open Clipchamp instead of doing anything itself. If that happens, read on.
Clipchamp: the bundled real editor
Clipchamp is preinstalled on Windows 11 and available on Windows 10 from the Store or the web. It is a genuine timeline editor: you can split a clip at any point, delete the piece in the middle, add tracks, and export. For a middle cut it does the job.
Two things to know before you open it. It requires signing in with a Microsoft account, which is the giveaway that it is a web application in a desktop wrapper. And the free tier’s rules — what resolution you can export at, whether a watermark is applied, which features are gated — have changed more than once since Microsoft bought the company. Rather than quote a limit that will be wrong next year, check Microsoft’s support site for the current state before you rely on it.
If you have Windows 11, do not mind the account, and the current free tier suits you, Clipchamp is the built-in answer for a middle cut. The rest of this guide is for when it does not.
The browser route
A browser tab is the option with no account, no watermark and no upload, and it works identically on Windows 10 and 11 in Edge or Chrome.
For a cut in the middle:
- Open the cut tool.
- Drop the file in, or click to pick it. MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM and AVI are read straight off your disk.
- Scrub to where the unwanted section starts and add a Cut. Drag its handles, or type start and end seconds, to cover exactly what should go.
- Add more cuts for more bad patches. Mix in speed changes if you want them.
- Apply. The result appears as a download and goes to your Downloads folder.
For trimming only the ends, the trim tool is the same engine with a simpler surface.
What it is doing: the file is read into the tab, FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly builds a filter graph out of your cuts and encodes the result once, and the file is handed back. Nothing leaves the machine, which you can check in the browser’s developer tools.
The honest trade is that the browser route re-encodes. Every cut is frame-accurate, which is the point, but the footage goes through one generation of H.264 compression to get there. On ordinary footage at the settings used that is not something you will notice; this guide explains when it matters. The other trade is memory: the whole file lives in the tab, so multi-gigabyte recordings are better handled by the next option.
The FFmpeg route
“Without installing anything” is very nearly true here, because on a current Windows machine FFmpeg is one command away in PowerShell:
winget install Gyan.FFmpegOpen a new terminal afterwards so the PATH change takes effect. Then, for a lossless trim of the ends:
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:10 -i input.mp4 -t 00:00:30 -c copy output.mp4That keeps thirty seconds starting at ten seconds in, and because of -c copy the compressed video is never decoded. It runs in a second or two and the picture is bit-for-bit the original. The catch is that a stream copy can only start at a keyframe, so the in-point snaps to the nearest keyframe before the time you asked for, typically within a second or two on phone footage and further on screen recordings.
Removing a section from the middle losslessly means cutting two pieces and joining them with the concat demuxer, with the same keyframe caveat on both joins. The FFmpeg trim guide has the exact commands, including why -ss behaves differently on either side of -i and why a copied file sometimes opens on a frozen frame.
If you need the cut exactly where you asked for it, drop -c copy and let FFmpeg re-encode; at that point you are doing on the command line what the browser tool does with a timeline.
Which one to use
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| Shorten the start or end, no precision needed | Photos Trim, or FFmpeg with -c copy |
| Remove a section from the middle, precise, no account | The browser cut tool |
| Remove a middle section, lossless, ends of cuts can drift to keyframes | FFmpeg with the concat demuxer |
| A full timeline editor with tracks and titles | Clipchamp, after checking its current free tier |
| A file measured in gigabytes | FFmpeg; the browser has a memory ceiling |
One rule across all of them: keep the original. Every one of these tools except the -c copy command produces a new generation of compression, and the source file is the only copy that has not been through one.
If you are not on Windows
The same question on other devices has its own answers: iPhone, Android and Chromebook each have a built-in trimmer with the same ends-only limit and the same browser route around it. The browser tool itself is described in full at how browser video editing works, and what it does and does not send anywhere is stated exactly on the private editor page.