Free video tools: trim, shrink, GIFs and background removal

Two kinds of tool live here. The first kind changes the video clip itself and is quick: trim, crop, resize, rotate, flip, reverse, speed up, merge or compress it, or turn a clip into a GIF and shrink the GIF afterwards. Most of those run on ConvertNinja. The second kind does per-frame work. VideoBGNinja removes a background without a green screen, makes transparent video and upscales old footage. Free background removal takes clips up to 90 seconds, and the upscaler needs about 7 seconds of computing for every second of video, so even its 20-second free limit is a couple of minutes of real GPU time, not an instant effect.

All 36 video tool pages and 3 how-to pages

Pick by what you need at the end. If the file is too big to send, compress or resize it. If you need the subject on its own, use background removal, and if you can still shoot, film against something plain: it is the best thing you can do for the result. If the footage is old and soft, an upscaler makes it nicer to look at, but it cannot bring back detail the camera never recorded. Subtitles are a different job and live under transcribe.

The limits are practical ones. The per-frame tools allow 10 free jobs a day, and in a busy hour a job waits, because the work runs on my own graphics cards and not in a datacenter. Nothing is watermarked. Uploads are deleted right after processing, and on VideoBGNinja results stay available for 45 minutes.

Editing a clip

Start with Trim Video: cutting the dead seconds at the start and end makes every later step faster and the file smaller. Crop Video takes off black bars or a distracting edge, Video Resizer sets the dimensions a platform asks for, and Rotate Video fixes a clip that was filmed sideways. Flip Video corrects a front-camera recording that came out mirrored, Reverse Video gives a rewind effect, and Merge Videos joins takes from the same camera when you want one file instead of three.

Speed Up Video gives a time-lapse feel and also helps when a talking-head recording drags. Compress Video belongs at the end, since compressing is the lossy step: the video quality drops a little each time a file is compressed again, so keep your original. Converting a file to MP4 is the safe choice when a site refuses it, because MP4 is the format that almost every phone, browser and editor accepts; Convert Video Format handles that, and free conversions take files of up to 1200 MB and 20 minutes. A Free Online Video Editor is enough for these jobs when you do not want to install anything, but for multi-track work a desktop editor is still the better choice. Think about the size before you put a video online, because a large file is the most common reason an upload fails.

GIFs

Video to GIF is the quickest way to share a short moment where video is not allowed, but a GIF is large for what it shows, so keep the clip short; VideoBGNinja makes GIFs of up to 20 seconds (from a clip of up to 90 seconds) and ConvertNinja converts up to 30 seconds of video to GIF. GIF Cutter trims the loop to the part that matters, Crop GIF removes empty borders, and Resize GIF and GIF Compressor bring the file under the upload limit of a chat app. Reverse GIF plays the loop backwards, and GIF Speed Changer makes a slow loop snappier. If a GIF will sit on a web page, converting it to MP4 usually gives a much smaller file; the MP4 is re-encoded and has no transparency.

Sound, music and watermarks

Remove Audio From Video drops the sound track and keeps the picture, which is useful when the background music is not cleared for sharing. When you want to add music to video, pick a track you have the rights to, and use Increase Video Volume only slightly, since boosting a quiet recording boosts the hiss as well. If you need the sound on its own, take the audio from video as an MP3 and clean it separately. The opposite request is to remove background music from video while keeping the voice, which is a separation job and works better on speech over simple music than on a crowded mix.

Remove Watermark from Video works on one still frame, not on a clip: pause the video, save the frame and paint the mark away. A TikTok watermark that moves between corners cannot be removed from a whole clip this way. Two guides cover that mark: What Is a TikTok Watermark? and Remove TikTok Watermark Tips.

Backgrounds and enhancing

Video calls use a virtual background. The Virtual Background Video tool is not a live call filter: as a video background remover it takes the room away from behind a person in a clip you recorded, without a green screen, and returns the cutout as a transparent WebM that you place on a scene in an editor that reads WebM transparency; Premiere, Final Cut and Resolve do not import it. The Product Video White Background page works the same way: you get a transparent WebM to put on white. If you already know Unscreen, the guide Free Unscreen Alternative is written for you, and Green Screen vs AI Matting weighs a real green screen against a software cut-out.

You do not have to film anything special to remove background from video, but a steady camera and even light give the cleanest edge, and free clips can run up to 90 seconds. The AI Video Enhancer upscales old, low-resolution footage and cleans it a little, and it needs real computing time: about 7 seconds of computing per second of video, so a 20-second clip, which is the free limit, takes roughly two and a half minutes. Anything larger than 640x360 is scaled down first, so the upscaler is for small, old clips.

Other groups: Photo tools · Audio tools · Transcribe & subtitles · PDF & documents · File converters · Text tools.