Trymmer Guide

Everything Trymmer can do, on Mac and iPad.

Opening videos

Trymmer opens MP4, MOV, and M4V videos.

• Mac: drag a video onto the Trymmer window or its Dock icon, choose File › Open (⌘O), use File › Open Recent, or right-click a video in Finder and choose Open With › Trymmer.
• iPad: tap Choose from Photos or Choose File… on the start screen, or drag a video in from another app in Split View or Slide Over.

Open two or more videos at once and Trymmer puts them end to end on one timeline. See Joining videos.

If you've edited a video before, reopening it brings back your marked ranges, crop, and rotation. A message lets you Start Over instead.

Marking what to keep

The yellow-bordered bands on the timeline are your ranges. In Keep mode they're the parts that will be exported. In Remove mode they're the parts that will be cut out. Switch modes with the Keep / Remove control at any time; your work is never lost.

Ways to make a range

• Select All (A) marks the whole video. Then drag the yellow handles inward to trim the start and end. This is the quickest way to trim one clip.
• Set In (I) and Set Out (O) at the playhead. Press I to start a range and O to finish it. With a range selected, I and O move its start and end.
• Drag in the band area just above the thumbnails to draw a range. On Mac, you can also hold ⌥ and drag anywhere on the timeline.

Changing ranges

• Drag a yellow handle to move that edge. The preview shows the exact frame as you drag, and handles snap to the playhead, chapters, and other ranges.
• Click a range to select it, then press Delete to remove it.
• The Range menu has Select All, Delete Range, Clear All Ranges, and Next / Previous Range.
• Ranges that overlap or touch merge into one.
• Every change can be undone with ⌘Z or the Undo button.

Selected, at the top right of the editing bar, shows the total length you're keeping.

Playing and moving around

• Click or tap the timeline to move the playhead, or drag to scrub.
• Space plays and pauses. ← and → step one frame; hold ⇧ to jump one second.
• J, K, L play backward, stop, and play forward. Press J or L again to go 2×, 4×, or 8×.
• Zoom the timeline with the zoom slider under it, by pinching, or with ⌘+ and ⌘−. ⌘0 fits the whole video. When zoomed in, swipe or scroll to move along.
• The waveform under the thumbnails shows the sound, which makes it easy to find speech and quiet parts.

Exporting

Click Export… (⌘E) to open the export sheet. Choose the quality, check the file name, and click Export. The job goes into the export queue, so you can keep working or open another video right away.

• File name: starts from your template in Settings, and you can edit it. With separate files, Trymmer adds -01, -02, and so on, and lists the names.
• Estimated size: shown at the bottom and updated as you change settings.
• Overrides (click to open): Export all clips separately makes one file per range instead of joining them; Audio keeps the original sound, normalizes its loudness, removes it, or picks which audio tracks to keep; Resolution makes this export smaller without editing your preset.

Where files go

By default, exports are saved next to the original video. On Mac, the first time you save to a folder Trymmer asks you to allow it; this is a macOS security rule, and Trymmer remembers your answer. To always save in one place, choose a folder in Settings.

On iPad, videos chosen from Photos are saved to On My iPad › Trymmer in the Files app, and Save to Photos adds them to your library. Trymmer never overwrites a file; it adds a number to the name instead.

Quality and exact cuts

Original Quality (fastest)

The default. Trymmer copies the original video and sound into the new file without re-encoding, so it's fast and looks exactly like the source. Audio tracks, subtitles, chapters, and metadata are kept.

A copied video can only start on a keyframe, a complete picture that later frames build on. So with Original Quality, each kept part starts at the keyframe just before your mark, usually less than two seconds earlier. The timeline shows where it will really start. The end is always exactly where you put it.

Exact cuts

Turn on Exact cuts under Quality to start each part on the exact frame you marked. Trymmer re-encodes only the frames from your cut to the next keyframe, at high quality and with the same format as the source, and copies everything else untouched. It's nearly as fast as Original Quality.

Exact cuts works with H.264 and HEVC videos (almost all phone and camera video). It isn't available with a crop or for several videos joined into one timeline; the sheet says why when it can't be used.

Presets

Choose HEVC High Quality, H.264 Compatible, ProRes (Apple silicon Macs), or one of your own presets to re-encode the video. Cuts are frame-exact, and you can change the format, size, and frame rate. Re-encoding takes longer, because every frame is compressed again.

Fit to Size

Pick a size limit, such as 25 MB for email or a chat app, and Trymmer sets the quality to stay under it, lowering the resolution if needed. The sheet shows the plan before you export. With separate files, each file gets the limit.

The export queue

Exports run one at a time in the export queue. Open it with the queue button in the toolbar or ⇧⌘E. It appears as a panel on the right of the window; on Mac, you can pop it out into its own window and dock it back later.

• Each export shows its progress and the time left.
• Pause and Resume the whole queue from its header.
• Cancel stops an export. A cancelled re-encode keeps a playable file up to where it stopped.
• Retry runs a failed or cancelled export again with the same settings.
• If you quit during an export, it comes back paused next time and continues from where it stopped.
• Trymmer can notify you when an export finishes while you're in another app.

Auto Mark

Auto Mark (in the editing bar and the Trim menu) marks ranges for you. Adjust the settings and the timeline updates live; click Apply to keep the result. It's one step to undo, and you can fine-tune the ranges by hand afterward. Auto Mark works within your current ranges, or on the whole video if nothing is marked.

• Remove Silences: cuts quiet stretches. Choose how quiet counts as silence, how long it must last, and how much sound to keep around each cut. Great for lectures, meetings, and voice recordings.
• Split at Scene Changes: splits ranges wherever the picture changes sharply, and can add a chapter at each scene. Adjust the sensitivity and the shortest scene length.
• Trim Black & Frozen Ends: removes black or unchanging frames at the very start and end, such as a lens cap or a screen recording that sits still before you start.

Chapters

If a video has chapters, they appear on the timeline as small flags. Click Chapters in the editing bar to see the list, where you can:

• Jump to, rename, or delete a chapter.
• Add a chapter at the playhead (also M).
• Mark as Ranges to make one range per chapter.
• Export Each… to export every chapter as its own file in one step.

Exports keep chapters, adjusted to the parts you kept.

Joining videos

Open or drop two or more videos together and they play end to end on one timeline. You can mark ranges across them as if they were one video, and each clip shows as a chapter, so Export Each… exports the clips separately.

To simply stitch clips together without editing, use File › Join Videos… (⌘J). Drag to put them in order, then export.

Clips of different resolutions

You can combine any mix of clips: 4K and 1080p, landscape and vertical, clips from different phones and cameras.

• If every clip has the same format, resolution, and frame rate (for example, clips from the same phone), the joined video stays at Original Quality, with nothing re-encoded.
• Otherwise, Trymmer re-encodes the video and fits each clip into the frame of the largest clip. Clips keep their shape, with black bars where the shapes differ (a vertical clip in a landscape video, for example), so nothing is stretched or cut off. The export sheet tells you which clip is different.
• To choose the resolution yourself, open Overrides in the export sheet and pick a Resolution such as 1080p or 720p, or use a preset with its own resolution. A custom preset can set any width.
• The preview, crop, and Fit to Size all work in the combined frame, so what you see is what you get.

Crop, rotate, and flip

• Rotate turns the video right or left (⌘R / ⌘L) or flips it. With Original Quality this is instant and lossless, which makes it perfect for fixing sideways phone videos.
• Crop shows a yellow box on the video. Choose a shape (freeform, 16:9, 9:16 for vertical video, square, and more), then drag the box and its handles. Cropping re-encodes the video, so it uses a preset.

Rotate and Crop turn yellow in the editing bar while they're in effect.

Frames and GIFs

The Frame menu in the editing bar can:

• Save Frame… (⇧⌘S): save the frame at the playhead as a PNG, HEIC, or JPEG image.
• Copy Frame (⌥⌘C): copy it to paste somewhere else.
• Make GIF… (⇧⌘G): turn the selected range, up to 30 seconds, into an animated GIF. Choose the size, frame rate, and whether it loops.

Presets

Presets hold the settings for re-encoded exports. The built-in ones can't be changed, but you can duplicate them. In Settings › Presets, add your own and choose the codec (HEVC, H.264, or ProRes), quality (a constant-quality slider from 0 to 100, or a target bitrate), resolution, frame rate, and audio.

Settings

• Output location: next to the original, or always in a folder you choose.
• File name template: build names from tokens: {name} (the original name), {index} (the range number), {start} and {end} (range times), {date}, and {mode}. A preview shows the result.
• Defaults: whether new videos open in Keep or Remove mode, whether exports are joined or separate, and whether Trymmer remembers your edits.
• Accent color: pick the color used for buttons and highlights.

Shortcuts and Finder

Trymmer adds actions to the Shortcuts app on Mac and iPad, ready to use in your own shortcuts:

• Trim Video: keep part of a video, by start and end time.
• Remove Silences: cut the quiet parts out of a video.
• Convert Video with Preset: re-encode a whole video.
• Open in Trymmer: open videos in the editor.

On Mac, you can also right-click videos in Finder and choose Services › Trim with Trymmer.

Tips for iPad

• Drag in the band area above the thumbnails to draw a range; there's no need for a modifier key.
• Videos from Photos stored in iCloud download first. Trymmer shows its progress while it does.
• Finished exports in the queue have a Share button.
• With a hardware keyboard, every keyboard shortcut works. Hold ⌘ to see them.

Keyboard shortcuts

Still stuck? See Support or email support@trymmer.app.