Reverse Video
Make any clip play backwards, frame by frame — with the sound reversed or removed.
Runs in your browser. Your video is never uploaded.
Drop a video to reverse it
MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV. Short clips reverse fastest — trim long recordings first.
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How to reverse a video
Drop a clip above, pick what should happen to the sound, and press Reverse video. When it finishes you can watch the result straight away, then download it as an MP4. The picture keeps its original resolution and orientation, so a portrait phone clip stays portrait.
Ideas for reversed video
- Impossible moments — water jumping back into a glass, a dive out of a pool, smoke pouring back into a candle.
- Boomerang loops — reverse a short clip and join it after the original with Cut & Merge for a clip that plays forwards then rewinds.
- Reveals — film something being taken apart or messed up, then reverse it so it assembles itself.
- Music videos and transitions — reversed motion over forwards music is a classic visual effect.
How it works, and why it is careful with memory
Video is compressed so that most frames are stored as small changes from the frames before them. That makes playing forwards cheap and playing backwards hard: you cannot decode frame 300 without first decoding everything back to the last full keyframe. A naive reverser decodes the entire video into memory and then reads it out backwards — fine for ten seconds, and a crashed tab for a five-minute 4K clip, whose 9,000 decoded frames would need over a hundred gigabytes.
This tool works through the video in sections from the end. Each section starts at a keyframe, is decoded forwards, copied into ordinary memory, and handed to the encoder last frame first. The section's memory is then released before the next one is decoded. Sections are sized by how much image data they hold, so a 4K clip uses short sections and a 720p clip longer ones, keeping the whole job within a few hundred megabytes on any device. The sound is handled the same way, in four-second blocks reversed sample by sample.
Every frame keeps its exact duration, so motion is reversed precisely rather than approximately, and the sound stays in sync with the picture throughout.
Combine with other edits
Reversing pairs well with changing the speed — a reversed clip at 0.5x makes a slow, dreamlike rewind. If you only want to reverse a few seconds of a longer recording, split it first and reverse just that piece; it will be much quicker than reversing the whole file.
Frequently asked questions
How do I play a video backwards?
Drop the video above, choose whether to reverse the sound or remove it, and press Reverse video. Every frame is placed in reverse order and saved as a new MP4 that plays backwards in any player.
What happens to the sound?
You choose. Reverse sound plays the audio backwards too, in sync with the picture — speech becomes the familiar backwards-tape sound, which suits effects and music videos. Remove sound gives a silent clip, ready for you to add music over it.
Is there a length limit?
There is no fixed limit, but reversing is heavier work than most edits: the video is decoded in short sections from the end, each section held in memory and fed to the encoder backwards. Clips of a few minutes are quick on any recent computer or phone. For very long recordings, cut out the part you need first — reversed footage is usually only a few seconds long anyway.
Does the reversed video lose quality?
It is re-encoded, because the frames must be put in a new order, so it is a fresh encode at a high quality setting rather than a byte-for-byte copy. In practice it looks the same as the original at normal viewing sizes.
Can I make a loop that plays forwards then backwards?
Yes. Reverse the clip here, then join the original and the reversed copy with the Cut & Merge tool. The result plays forwards and then back to where it started — the "boomerang" effect.
Is my video uploaded?
No. All of the work happens in your browser using your device's video hardware. Your file never leaves your device.