Video Transitions Online

Drop your clips in playback order, pick a transition for each join, watch the preview, then export.

1. 1

   Add your clips

   Drop two or more videos in the order you want them to play. One clip on its own gets a fade instead.

2. 2

   Pick a transition

   Select a join on the timeline and choose from 29 transitions. Set its length, and whether it runs at a constant speed or eases in and out.

3. 3

   Check the preview

   Drag the scrub bar to see the exact frames the join will produce, or press Play to watch it once through.

4. 4

   Export

   Choose MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, press Apply, and download the finished video.

A hard cut says next. A transition says how. Two clips joined by a one-second crossfade read as one continuous thought; the same two joined by a wipe read as a deliberate change of subject; joined through black, they read as the end of a chapter. Nothing about the footage changes — only the half-second between the shots — and that half-second is most of what separates a sequence of clips from something that looks edited.

There is a practical side too. Transitions cover the joins that are hard to cut cleanly: a camera that moved between takes, two shots with different white balance, an interview where the subject shifted position. A crossfade over ten frames hides all three, and it is quicker than reshooting any of them.

What this tool gives you

• Twenty-nine transitions. Blends, ten wipes, four slides, shapes, a zoom and a pixelate — not one fade with a duration slider.
• A different one at every join. A twenty-clip sequence can open on a fade through black, cut through the body on quick dissolves, and close on a slow circle.
• A real preview. Scrub through the exact frames the join will write, before you spend anything encoding it.
• Length bounded by the clips. The slider's range is the range that actually works, so it can never promise a two-second transition on a one-second clip.
• Sound handled properly. Audio crossfades with an equal-power curve at every join, so the level does not dip where the join is.
• Runs on your device, not our servers. No upload, no watermark, no export minutes to run out of.

Grouped by what they do to the picture rather than alphabetically, because that is how you choose one. Every transition below runs at any length you set and in either timing curve.

Blends — the two pictures occupy the frame together

• Crossfade. The workhorse. Clip one fades out while clip two fades in, both visible throughout. Reads as continuity: same place, later; same idea, developed.
• Dissolve. Pixels switch individually rather than the whole frame fading. Grainier and more textural than a crossfade, and it survives being short — a six-frame dissolve still reads, where a six-frame crossfade barely registers.
• Fade through black. Clip one goes to black, then black goes to clip two. The strongest full stop available: time passed, subject changed, chapter ended.
• Fade through white. The same shape with a brighter feeling. Common for memory, dream and flashback, and for anything that should feel light rather than final.
• Distance. The parts of the frame where the two clips already agree switch first; the parts where they differ most switch last. Between two similar shots it is nearly invisible; between two very different ones it visibly erodes from what they share.
• Blur dissolve. Both pictures go soft, cross, and come back sharp. The blur hides the cut, which makes it useful over joins that are otherwise hard to disguise.

Wipes — a moving edge reveals the next clip

• Left, right, up and down. A straight edge crosses the frame. Directional and declarative — a wipe right reads as moving forward, a wipe left as going back.
• The four diagonals. From any corner. Softer than an axis wipe because the edge is longer and never parallel to the frame.
• Smooth left and smooth right. The same movement with an edge a quarter of the frame wide instead of a hard line. Halfway between a wipe and a crossfade, and the one to reach for when a hard wipe feels too abrupt.

Slides — the frames themselves move

• Slide left, right, up and down. The outgoing clip is pushed off the frame while the incoming one arrives behind it. Unlike a wipe, both pictures travel, which reads as physical movement between two places rather than one picture replacing another.

Shapes and effects

• Circle open and circle close. A circle grows from the centre to reveal the next clip, or shrinks to close on it. The closing one is a classic ending.
• Rectangle crop. A rectangle expands from the centre. Squarer and more graphic than the circle; it suits titles and product shots.
• Radial sweep. A sweep from twelve o'clock, like a clock hand. Reads as time passing, which is exactly what it is usually used for.
• Zoom. The outgoing clip pushes towards the viewer as the incoming one settles back. Energetic; a favourite for short-form and music cuts.
• Pixelate. Both clips break into blocks, swap at the coarsest point, and resolve again. The cut happens where the picture is least legible, which is the whole trick.

On a single clip

• Fade in. Opens from black.
• Fade out. Closes to black.
• Fade in and out. Both, on one clip, with the length applied at each end.

Most sequences need fewer transitions than people expect. The default in professional editing is the straight cut, and a transition is what you reach for when the cut is doing the wrong thing. Three questions usually settle it.

• Is time passing? Then use a blend. A crossfade for a little time, a fade through black for a lot. A wipe or a slide implies movement, not duration, and will read as the wrong answer.
• Is the subject changing? Then use something with a direction or a shape — a wipe, a slide, a circle. These announce a change rather than smoothing it over, which is what you want when the two shots are genuinely unrelated.
• Is the cut simply awkward? Then use the shortest blend that hides it. Six to ten frames of dissolve or blur will cover a jump cut, a white-balance shift or a repositioned subject without the audience registering a transition at all.

One more rule worth stating: pick one family and stay in it. A sequence that fades, then wipes, then spins, then pixelates does not read as varied — it reads as a demo of the transition menu. Using the same crossfade at eleven joins and one fade through black at the twelfth is a stronger edit than twelve different effects, and the twelfth one lands because everything before it did not.

Length is the setting people get wrong most often, and it is the one that changes the result most. Some numbers to start from, at 30 frames per second:

• 6–10 frames (0.2–0.35 s). Invisible. Hides a bad cut without the audience noticing anything happened. This is where most transitions in professional work actually sit.
• 15–30 frames (0.5–1 s). Noticeable and gentle. The standard crossfade between two shots of the same scene.
• 45–90 frames (1.5–3 s). Deliberate. A slow dissolve or a fade through black at a chapter break. At this length the transition is a shot in its own right.
• Over 3 seconds. Rare, and usually a mistake unless the footage under it is very slow. Both clips lose several seconds of their own screen time to it.

That last point is the arithmetic worth understanding, because it surprises people. A transition does not sit between two clips — it overlaps them. Two four-second clips joined by a one-second transition produce a seven-second video, not nine: the last second of clip one and the first second of clip two play at the same time. Add a transition to a sequence and it gets shorter, and the estimate beside the export control accounts for that.

It also means a transition cannot be longer than the clips it joins can spare. This tool bounds the length slider to what the two neighbouring clips can actually give up, and in a chain it accounts for what the join on the other side of each clip already takes — so the value on screen is always a value the export can honour. Tools that leave the slider at a fixed range instead will silently shorten your transition at encode time and tell you afterwards, if at all.

The timing curve decides how the transition's progress is spread across its own duration, and it is a genuinely different look from the same effect at the same length.

• Linear. Constant speed from start to finish. Mechanical and even. It is what every other tool in this category produces, and it is the right default for a crossfade — a fade with a constant rate of change is what the eye expects.
• Ease in and out. Starts slowly, accelerates through the middle, slows to a stop. Reads as physical rather than mechanical, and it flatters anything with movement in it — slides, zooms and wipes especially. On a long dissolve it keeps the midpoint, where both pictures are equally visible and the frame looks its muddiest, short.

If you are unsure, use linear for blends and ease for anything that moves. The preview will settle the argument in about two seconds either way.

Most tools in this category cap you at two clips per pass, which turns a five-shot sequence into four separate exports, each one re-encoding the output of the last. That is four generations of compression on the first clip by the time you are done, and it is why the fifth export always looks worse than the first.

• Up to twenty clips in one pass. Every clip is decoded from its original file and encoded exactly once, however many joins there are between them.
• A transition per join. Select any join on the timeline and give it its own style, length and curve. Nineteen joins can be nineteen different transitions, or all the same.
• One press to unify them. Use these settings on all transitions copies the selected join to every other one — useful when you have found the crossfade length you want and need the other eighteen to match.
• Reorder without re-uploading. Move a clip up or down and every join around it re-bounds itself immediately. Nothing is re-read from disk.

Clips do not have to match. Different resolutions, different aspect ratios, different frame rates and different containers can all sit in one sequence: everything is composited into a single output frame, letterboxed rather than stretched, at one frame rate. A 4K clip next to a phone video works, and neither one is distorted to make it fit.

A transition that handles the picture and ignores the audio produces a video with a visible blend and an audible cut, which is worse than either done consistently. Every join here crossfades the sound over the same window as the picture.

• Equal-power, not linear. Two unrelated signals faded with linear gains lose about 3 dB in the middle of the fade — an audible hole exactly where the join is, which is the one place a listener is already paying attention. A cosine and sine pair keeps the summed power constant across the fade instead.
• Overlapped, not concatenated. The two clips' audio is summed on the finished timeline, so the sound is exactly as long as the picture. Appending a faded-out tail followed by a faded-in head sounds like a gap, and it makes the audio drift further behind the video at every join.
• Silence is generated, not skipped. A clip with no audio track among clips that have one gets real silence for its full length, so the sound does not stop part-way through while the picture carries on.
• Mixed sample rates and mono sources. Everything is resampled to 48 kHz stereo before mixing. A mono clip is duplicated to both channels rather than left playing on one side.
• Or turn it off. One checkbox exports the picture with no audio track at all.

The list is closed and it is enforced at the file picker, not discovered after a progress bar. A file that cannot be opened is refused in about a quarter of a second, before anything starts, with a sentence saying what it is and where to go next.

Goes in

• MP4 and MOV. H.264, HEVC, AV1 and VP9, subject to what your browser can decode. This covers almost every phone and camera.
• WebM. VP8, VP9 and AV1.
• MKV. Everything the other three carry, in one container.

Comes out

• MP4 — H.264 and AAC. The safe answer. Plays on everything, uploads everywhere.
• MOV — H.264 and AAC. The same picture in Apple's container, for Final Cut and iMovie workflows.
• WebM — VP9 and Opus. Smaller at the same quality, and the right choice for a web page. Older Apple devices are the exception.
• MKV — H.264 and AAC. For an archive or a media server that would rather have one container for everything.

Refused, and why

• AVI, WMV, FLV, MPEG and 3GP. These carry codecs — Theora, VC-1, MPEG-4 Part 2 — that no browser exposes for local decoding. This is not a limit of this tool; nothing that works without uploading your file can open them, so the refusal points you at the converter rather than suggesting a different browser.
• OGV. Opens, but the video track inside is Theora, which has the same problem.
• Animated GIF. Refused here by name, with a link to the GIF maker, which is the tool that actually joins frames into an animation.

Which codecs work is a property of your browser and your machine, not of this page, so the tool asks at run time rather than promising a number. HEVC decodes in Chrome and Edge and not in Firefox, for instance — the same file, three different answers, all of them correct.

A transition rewrites pixels at the join, so unlike a straight join there is no way to avoid re-encoding. That makes the export settings worth a moment.

• Match source is the default, and usually right. The output takes the first clip's dimensions. Choosing a resolution larger than any of your clips does nothing useful — re-encoding cannot invent detail, so the tool clamps the target to the largest source rather than upscaling it into a bigger file.
• The bitrate comes from your footage. Not from a preset table. The encoder is given a share of what the sources actually spend, weighted by how much of the output each clip occupies, and scaled down if the output frame is smaller. It never spends more bits than the source contained, because those bits would carry no information.
• Quality is a factor, not a number. High keeps the source's rate, medium takes about 72% of it, small file about half. Medium is a good default and is genuinely hard to tell from high at 1080p.
• Frame rate: match, or pick one. Mixed frame rates are resolved to a single output rate. Match takes the first clip's real rate rather than rounding it up — a 10 fps screen recording stays at 10.
• Mismatched shapes. Fit letterboxes and never crops, and is the default. Fill crops to the frame and never letterboxes, which is right for turning landscape footage into a vertical reel. Stretch distorts, and exists only because it is occasionally what someone wants.

Everything that makes a transition a transition is free. All twenty-nine styles, both timing curves, per-join settings, the preview, the audio crossfade and every output format are available on the free plan, and nothing this tool exports carries a watermark.

• Free. Up to three clips in one pass — two joins, which is an opener, a body and a close. Files up to 200 MB each and 500 MB in total, exports up to 1080p and up to ten minutes.
• Pro. Up to twenty clips, 4K exports at the source's own frame rate, and no imposed file-size cap — the ceiling is whatever your device can hold.
• What Pro is not. It is not a way to unlock effects. There is no transition, no curve and no control on this page that a free user cannot reach, because a transition tool with locked transitions is a demo rather than a tool.

For comparison, checked on 2026-08-27: Kapwing's free tier exports at 720p with a watermark, caps a single export at one minute and the whole month at thirty; VEED's free tier watermarks every export and caps it at 720p and ten minutes; Clipchamp gives unlimited watermark-free 1080p but wants a Microsoft account and uploads every byte to a server. All three are worth using. None of them lets you keep the file on your own machine.

Your clips are read, decoded, composited and re-encoded on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, and the page keeps working after it has loaded even if the network goes away.

What actually happens when you press Apply

• Headers are read first. Each clip's container is parsed and your browser is asked whether it can decode the codec inside. Nothing is decoded during this, which is why an unsupported file is refused in milliseconds rather than after a spinner.
• A plan is built before anything moves. Output size, frame rate, bitrate, the length of every join and where each clip lands are all decided from metadata alone, then bounded against how much memory the transitions will need. A job that could not finish is refused before it starts, rather than discovered half way through by a tab that stops responding.
• Frames are decoded once each. Not seeked to individually. Asking a decoder for one frame at a time re-decodes the same compressed data over and over; reading the whole run in order instead is several times faster on the same hardware.
• The join is composited. The outgoing clip's tail is held while the incoming clip's head decodes, and the two are combined by the transition's own kernel. The same code draws the preview you scrubbed, which is why the two agree.
• Everything is encoded once. Hardware-accelerated where your machine offers it, streaming out as it goes rather than being assembled in memory.
• The whole job runs in the background. So the page stays responsive while it works, and Cancel actually stops the encoder rather than just hiding the progress bar.

Two ten-second 1080p clips joined with a one-second crossfade export in about four seconds on a current laptop, using our own compositing pipeline and your machine's hardware video encoder.

• The file was refused as soon as I picked it. Its container is not one this architecture can open — AVI, WMV, FLV, MPEG, 3GP and OGV all fall here. The message links to the converter; convert to MP4 first and everything works.
• My transition came out shorter than I set it. One of the clips beside it could not spare that much time. The slider bounds itself to what the neighbours can give, but if you reorder clips or remove one after setting a length, the note under the export button will say how many joins were shortened.
• The preview is blank. The frames at that join are still being read — it says so under the scrub bar. On a large 4K source this takes a second or two. The export does not wait for it.
• The output has no sound. Check the audio checkbox in the settings. If it is on and there is still no sound, none of your source clips had an audio track this browser could decode.
• It says the video is too long. Free exports up to ten minutes. Cut the sequence down with the video cutter first, or go Pro.
• A clip looks squashed. Set mismatched shapes to Fit rather than Stretch. Fit letterboxes and never distorts.

• Video merge
• Video cutter
• Video color correction
• Video resizer
• Video to GIF
• Video speed control