Three new ways to cut: join clips, fast mode, and playback speed

1. Join clips into one file

The cutter has long let you queue several clips from the same video — three highlights from a podcast, the best moments from a lecture, a short montage from a long stream. Until now, the result was a ZIP archive: each clip a separate file. If you wanted them stitched together into a single video, you had to do that yourself in another tool.

That extra step is gone. When you queue two or more clips, a new "Join clips into one file" toggle appears. Flip it on and the cutter glues them together for you, in the order you queued them. You get one MP4, not a ZIP.

It is most useful for "best of" compilations from a podcast or stream, lecture digests where you want only the bits you care about, and short cut-up trailers. The clips are joined as-is — no music, no transitions, no fade. Clean cuts, in your order.

2. Fast mode

Most of the time, the cutter takes your video apart frame-by-frame and rebuilds the part you want, so the result starts and ends at exactly the second you picked. That is precise, and it is the right default — but it takes time, especially for long cuts.

Fast mode skips the rebuild. It hands you the part you want without re-encoding the video, which makes the cut roughly ten times faster. A 90-minute lecture cut that would normally take a few minutes now finishes in seconds.

The trade-off, in plain English: your start and end times will land on the nearest "keyframe" — usually within two to ten seconds of where you set them. So fast mode is great for "I just want this section of the lecture, give it to me now," and not great for "I need this exact frame." If you need precision, leave fast mode off.

One small caveat: some video editors are picky about the exact format of the output and may not import a fast-mode file natively. If you plan to drop the cut into Premiere or Final Cut, the regular mode is the safer choice.

3. Playback speed (0.5× to 2×)

Pick a speed for your cut: 0.5× (half-speed), 1× (normal — the default), 1.25×, 1.5×, or 2×. The cutter does the math: your selected range plays back faster or slower in the downloaded file, and the file's duration changes to match. A 60-minute cut at 2× becomes a 30-minute file. A 5-minute clip at 0.5× becomes a 10-minute file.

Crucially, voices keep their normal pitch. There is no chipmunk effect when you speed up, no robotic baritone when you slow down. People sound like themselves, just faster or slower. Behind the scenes the cutter uses a pitch-preserving algorithm that broadcast and audiobook editors have used for years.

When does this earn its keep? A few examples we keep hearing about:

Tutorials and lectures at 1.5× or 2× — the same content, half the time. The classic 'watch a 90-minute lecture in 30 minutes' use case.
Music or instructional videos at 0.5× — slow enough to study a guitar solo, a dance move, or a piece of dialogue you want to transcribe.
Speeches and interviews at 1.25× — a small bump that compounds over an hour-long talk.

Mixing the three

Join clips works with the playback-speed control — queue four highlights from a lecture, set 1.5×, and you get one tightened-up video. Fast mode is the odd one out: because it skips the re-encode, it cannot also change playback speed (a speed change requires a re-encode by definition). The cutter handles this for you — picking a non-1× speed turns fast mode off, and turning fast mode on resets the speed to 1×.

What we are working on next

We are looking at extending playback-speed and fast mode to more output types — currently they apply to MP4, MP3 and the audio-with-video export, but not yet to GIFs or the 9:16 smart-crop output. If one of those would be useful to you, the support page is the fastest way to tell us.