Trim a video to a specific length for social media

Find the real limit first — do not trust a blog post

The single most common way this goes wrong is trimming to a number somebody read in an article. Short-form video limits have been moved repeatedly over the last few years, almost always upward, and every platform has more than one limit depending on where you upload from and what kind of account you have.

So this page does not list second counts. A number written here is stale the moment a platform changes it, and a stale number stated confidently is worse than no number at all. Spend ten seconds on the authoritative source instead:

A useful habit: aim two or three seconds under whatever the limit is. Duration is computed from timestamps and the last frame can land marginally past where you expect, and being fractionally over is the one failure mode that wastes the whole upload.

Hitting an exact duration on the timeline

The editor shows an estimated output duration that updates as you adjust your edits, which turns "get this under 60 seconds" from guesswork into reading a number.

1. 01

   Open the clip and read its current length

   It is shown next to the file name as soon as the file is loaded. That is your starting point and the amount you need to lose is simple subtraction from there.

2. 02

   Cut the obvious waste first

   Dead air at the start, the fumbled opening, the bit where you reach for the mouse, the trailing seconds before you stopped recording. This is usually most of what you need and costs the viewer nothing.

3. 03

   Watch the estimate, not the clock

   Every cut you add updates the estimated output duration below the timeline. Widen or narrow the last cut's handles until the estimate reads the length you want.

4. 04

   Trim from both ends if you need to

   Add one cut from 0 to your new start point and another from your new end point to the end of the clip. The middle survives; both estimates are accounted for together. Or mark the middle with one edit and press "Keep only this part", which adds both cuts for you.

5. 05

   Apply once, at the end

   Every cut becomes part of a single filter graph and the video is encoded once. Do not export, reopen and cut again — that costs a generation of compression each time.

When the content genuinely will not fit

Sometimes there is nothing left to cut and you are still eight seconds over. Most people at this point cut something they wanted to keep. There is a better move.

Speed up a passage instead of deleting it. Select the slowest stretch — a walk between two points, a wait, a build-up — and give it 1.25× or 1.5×. A forty-second passage at 1.25× becomes thirty-two, and at that factor viewers do not consciously register the change. Audio is retimed with pitch correction, so speech still sounds like the same person. Speed up part of a video covers the multipliers in detail.

The arithmetic is easy to plan with: a section of length L at factor f becomes L/f, so you save L − L/f seconds. Thirty seconds at 1.5× saves ten. Sixty seconds at 2× saves thirty.

You can stack this with cuts on the same timeline — cut the dead air, speed up the slow middle, and apply both in one encode. That is usually enough to bring a clip in under a limit without losing anything the viewer wanted.

Trim the front harder than the back

A practical note about short-form specifically. Nearly everyone trims the end of a clip and leaves the beginning alone, and it is the wrong way round. The opening seconds are where a viewer decides whether to keep watching, and they are also where almost every recording is at its weakest — settling, checking the frame, an intake of breath before the first word.

When you are cutting to a hard limit, take the seconds off the front first. It both saves the length you need and improves the clip, which is a rare combination.

What this tool does not do

Worth being direct, because the neighbouring problem gets conflated with this one constantly. This editor does three things — cut, speed up, slow down — and reframing is not among them. There is no crop, no rotate and no aspect-ratio change, so it cannot turn a horizontal recording into a vertical 9:16 post. If that is what you need, you need a different tool for that step.

What it does have is a max-resolution control that scales the whole frame down to 1080p, 720p or 480p, preserving its shape. That is a size and speed control rather than a framing one, and it is genuinely useful before an upload over a mobile connection. More on output formats and resolution.

Quality, and what the platform does to it anyway

Every edit here re-encodes, because a stream being filtered cannot also be stream-copied. That trade is written up in full here. In this particular context it matters less than usual, for a reason worth knowing: every platform re-encodes your upload regardless, typically into several resolutions. Your file is never delivered to viewers as you sent it.

What genuinely protects quality is limiting the number of generations. One local edit followed by the platform's own encode is two. Exporting, reopening, trimming again and re-exporting before upload is four, and that is where visible degradation comes from. Stack every change into one pass.

Questions about trimming to a length limit