Turning a video black and white removes the colours and keeps the light and shade, for a timeless look, a flashback, or to hide a distracting colour cast from mixed lighting.
How to make a video black and white
- Upload the video (MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, MPEG, TS and more; up to 2 GB).
- Effect: Black and white is already chosen.
- Start, and download the black and white video.
What you get
- Every frame in shades of grey: the colour is removed and the brightness of every part of the picture stays as it was, so faces, skies and shadows keep their detail.
- Sound: the main sound track is kept, unchanged where the format allows.
- Same size and frame rate, and upright phone videos stay upright.
- Format: MP4, MOV, MKV and WebM stay in their format; other formats become MP4. The video is re-encoded at high quality. It is still a colour video file, so it plays everywhere.
Other looks
The same tool has related effects:
- Sepia: warm brown tones, like an old photograph.
- Vintage film look: faded colours and darker corners.
- Brightness, contrast and saturation: saturation 0 % is black and white too, and together with contrast above 100 % it gives a punchier black and white. Saturation around 50 % keeps a hint of colour.
Limits
The effect re-encodes the whole video: about 25 minutes of 1080p video at 30 frames per second fit in one job, longer for smaller videos. Cut a long recording first with the video trimmer.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Video Effects.