Reversing a video makes it play backwards: a jump ends on the diving board, spilled water flows back into the glass, a pile of blocks builds itself. The whole video is reversed, from the last frame to the first, and the sound can be reversed with it or left out.
How to reverse a video
- Upload the video (MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, MPEG, TS and more; up to 2 GB).
- Effect: Reverse is already chosen.
- Under Sound, keep Reverse the sound too, or pick Remove the sound for a silent result. Reversed speech sounds like nonsense, so many people remove it.
- Start, and download the reversed video.
What you get
- Every frame, backwards: nothing is skipped, and the frame rate stays the same as the original's.
- Upright phone videos are turned upright first, so the result plays the right way up in every player.
- Format: MP4, MOV, MKV and WebM stay in their format; other formats become MP4. The video is re-encoded at high quality; the reversed sound is encoded at 160 kbps (AAC, or Opus in WebM). Only the main sound track is kept.
Long videos
Reversing needs the last frame before the first one, so a simple approach holds the whole video in memory, and long clips fail. Here the video is reversed in short pieces that are joined in reverse order, so a long video works as well as a short one. The limit is processing time: about 20 minutes of 1080p video at 30 frames per second, about 40 minutes of 720p, or about 5 minutes of 4K.
Tips
- To reverse only a part of a longer video, cut that part out first with the video trimmer: it is quicker, and the file is smaller.
- For a clip that plays forwards and then backwards, choose Boomerang instead.
- A video reversed twice plays forwards again, but it has been re-encoded twice. Keep the original.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Video Effects.