If you are taking your first faltering steps in video editing, some operations on video files might sound alike to you. This is especially true when it comes to trimming, cutting and cropping. At first sight, all these operations are very similar because they are all done by cutting your video files. In this guide, we will tell you how to distinguish these notions and how to trim, cut and crop your video files with ease using AVS Video Editor.

Trimming

By trimming, we usually mean the process of cutting off either a part of the beginning or the end of a video file to reduce its total length and leave the desired content.

Trimming is vitally important if you want to make sure that your video starts quickly and your viewers won’t get bored waiting for something interesting to happen. 

The first seconds of your video clip are what draws the attention of your viewers and convinces them to watch the whole video. When applied intelligently, video trimming helps you remove all the unnecessary frames form the end or the beginning of your video clip leaving the content that your viewers might like.

Trimming is really easy to apply to with AVS Video Editor. You can trim any of your videos using the Trim feature. Please, refer to this guide to find out more.

Deleting the unnecessary frames from the end and the beginning of a video clipwith AVS Video Editor

Cutting

Cutting is another fundamental video editing skill. It is normally understood as the process of removing a section of your video by cutting in two places and lifting out the middle section and combining the leftover video back together.

Cutting is useful when you need to polish a video clip and cut off some meaningless snippets. It might also be a good idea to apply cutting when you want to insert a section of a video clip into another one. Finally, this operation deserves your attention when you plan to share your video clip on social networks and have to cut it into several pieces because of the video length limits.

Cutting is often confused with trimming because both of them are about deleting some parts from the video. However, when you trim a video clip, you delete its beginning and /or end while cutting means cutting a piece out of your video file somewhere else. If you want to edit videos like a pro, you need to understand this crucial difference.

AVS Video Editor makes cutting a piece of cake with the Multi Trim feature. Just read this guide and see for yourself.

Cutting the unnecessary scenes out of a video clip with AVS Video Editor

Cropping

Last but not least, let’s say a few words about cropping. By this, we usually mean the process of removing unwanted outer areas from your video clip or changing its dimensions to fit within a certain area.

In other words, performing this operation you can choose what part of your video will be visible to your viewers. It can also be useful for fitting the video clip to a new aspect ratio. All in all, this operation helps you to adjust the edges of your video so that your viewers can pay their attention to what is really important.

Like trimming and cutting, cropping is easy to use and master with AVS Video Editor. You just need to use the Crop Scale feature. More information in this guide.

Deleting the unnecessary outer areas from a video clip with AVS Video Editor

As you can see, trimming, cutting and cropping are completely different video editing operations, although they have a lot in common. Now you know the differences between these techniques and can use any of them depending on what you are going to achieve. No matter what operation you plan to perform, be it cutting, trimming or cropping, it can be easily and efficiently done with video cropping software, such as AVS Video Editor. This tool allows you to do even more:

• edit and save videos in all popular formats (MP4, DVD, AVI, MOV, VOB, WMV, MKV, FLV, WEBM, etc.);
• record media files from your PC screen;
• split and join videos;
• fix shaky footage;
• use the chroma key effect;
• insert captions, visual effects and transitions;
• adjust video for your iOS and Android devices;
• create videos for the most popular video hosting websites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).

We hope this guide was useful to you. If you have any questions, please use the comments section below. Your feedback is always appreciated!