Quickly Trimming a Video in VLC

Sometimes you might want to remove (trim) the first few seconds from a video before you
post it. There are numerous other ways to do this, including using Adobe Premier Pro
(heavy!) or using a web-based service such as veed.io (limited free version!), but VLC offers
a quick way to handle a simple trimming task and is installed on every lab machine.

First, open the video you want to trim in VLC.

Then, with the video you want to trim open, go to the View menu and make sure “Advanced
Controls” is ticked:

Move the playhead cursor to where you want the new video clip to start from (i.e. the start of
the section you want to keep), and then click the small, red record button in the bottom left
corner of the main VLC window:
Once you have clicked the red record button, click the Play button immediately below it and
let the video play until its end.
Once playback completes, the re-recorded (trimmed) video will be located in your My Videos
folder: