Reverse Video Online — Boomerang, Speed & GIF Export

Boomerang plays the video forward then backward in a loop, creating the popular Instagram boomerang effect.

Yes. Choose "Reverse" for audio to play it backwards with the video, "Keep" to preserve original audio, or "Mute" to remove it.

Because the last frame has to be ready before the first one can be written. Trimming can copy a stream forward; reversing has to decode the whole clip and hold the frames to play them back to front, so memory grows with duration times resolution rather than with the file on disk. Boomerang costs a little more again, since the result is the clip forwards and backwards. Short clips are the natural fit; for a long one, trim first and reverse the piece you need.

Yes, and not only to save time. Reversing means the last frame has to be available before the first one can be shown, so the whole span you reverse has to be decoded and held — which is why a two-minute source turned around whole is far heavier on a phone than the six seconds you actually wanted. Set the start and end first and the tool reverses only that stretch. There is a second reason: a reversed shot reads as a trick, and the trick works for a few seconds and stops being interesting after that. Almost every good reversed clip is short, and cutting first is what makes you choose which seconds those are.

The format drops to 256 colours and has no audio, and its size grows with every frame rather than with the length in seconds — so the frame rate and the width are the two dials that matter. Twelve to fifteen frames a second reads as smooth for most motion and costs less than half of thirty; a width of 480 is plenty for a chat or a forum post, and 640 is already a large file. Gradients suffer most, because 256 colours cannot hold a sky, and you will see banding where the video was smooth. If the clip has sound that carries the joke, or if it is longer than about five seconds, an MP4 will look better and weigh less almost everywhere it can be posted.