ottercraft.devGuide · OtterStudio
Trim a video without uploading it
Most of the time the edit you want is small: lose the fumbling at the start, cut it off before the end, maybe take a dead patch out of the middle. That should not involve uploading two gigabytes to someone's server and waiting for it to come back. OtterStudio does it in the tab.
Open OtterStudio →Get the video in
Open studio.ottercraft.dev and drag the video onto the page, or press Add file. It appears on the timeline at the bottom, starting at zero. If the video has sound, you get two tracks: the picture on a video track and the sound on an audio track underneath. They stay in step, and the split is there so you can turn the sound down or replace it later without touching the picture.
Nothing has been sent anywhere. The browser has opened the file from your disk the way a video player would. You can check this in the browser's network panel if you like: there is a short guide to doing that.
Cut the ends off
Click the clip on the timeline to select it. Handles appear at both ends. Drag the left one to the right to lose the start; drag the right one to the left to lose the end. The picture above follows as you drag, so you can see exactly what frame you are landing on.
For a precise cut, play the video and press pause where you want it, or click the progress bar under the picture. Then drag the handle to the red playhead line. The clip's start and end round to the frame.
Trimming does not throw anything away. The clip remembers the whole file, and you can drag the handle back out later if you cut too much.
Take a piece out of the middle
Put the playhead where the unwanted part starts, select the clip, and press Split at playhead in the card on the right. You now have two clips. Move the playhead to where the unwanted part ends and split again. Select the middle piece and press Delete.
That leaves a gap. Drag the right-hand clip left until it touches the one before it; it snaps into place. If the video had sound, do the same on the audio track, or select both audio and video before splitting so the cuts line up.
Zoom in for fine cuts
The Zoom slider above the timeline stretches it out so a second takes up more room. At the far end a single frame is a visible width, which is what you want when a cut has to land between two words. The timeline scrolls sideways as you drag a clip towards its edge.
Save it
Press Export MP4. A dialog asks three things. Resolution offers the video's own size and the standard sizes below it. Frame rate offers its own rate and the common lower ones. Quality is the bitrate: Standard looks the same as the original to most eyes and is usually a smaller file than what came out of the camera; High is for footage that will be re-encoded again by YouTube or a messaging app; Smaller file is for sending to someone's phone.
The dialog shows a size, marked "up to about", and it means it. The encoder spends fewer bits on still scenes, so a quiet talking-head shot comes out well under the figure.
Press Start export. The frames are drawn from the preview and encoded as you watch, which is why the tab has to stay in front while it runs. A minute of 1080p takes somewhere around a minute on a laptop; 4K takes longer. When it finishes, the MP4 downloads like any other file.
What you get
An H.264 MP4 with AAC sound, which plays on everything: phones, TVs, PowerPoint, WhatsApp. It is re-encoded, so it is not bit for bit the same as the original, but at Standard quality you will be hard pressed to see a difference. If the source was 60 frames a second and you kept it at 60, motion stays as smooth as it was.
If the export button is greyed out
The browser has no video encoder. Chrome, Edge and recent Safari have one; Firefox does not yet. You can still edit in Firefox and your project is saved in the browser as you go, so you can open the same project in Chrome to export, pointing it at the same file.