To reverse a video, open it in a video editor — CapCut on a phone, or iMovie, Premiere Pro, or DaVinci Resolve on desktop — select the clip, and apply Reverse (or Reverse Speed). The clip and the audio baked into it flip end to end together. Your phone’s gallery app can’t do it. If you only want the sound reversed while the picture stays forward, detach the audio and flip that file separately in a free audio reverser.
How do you reverse a video on your phone?
Stock gallery apps don’t reverse video — iPhone Photos and Google Photos both ship trim, crop, and filters, but no reverse. The standard free answer on both platforms is CapCut. Start a project, add the clip, tap it once so the editing toolbar appears, then scroll to Reverse. CapCut renders the clip back to front and the audio inside it flips along with the picture — a skateboarder un-lands, a spoken line turns into that garbled reverse-speech sound.
It is one action, not two. Because the audio is embedded in the video clip, you don’t reverse the sound separately; the single Reverse button does both. On longer clips a progress bar runs while CapCut re-renders, then the flipped clip sits on your timeline ready to export.
The full mobile walkthrough, including CapCut’s audio-only limitation, is in how to reverse audio in CapCut. If you specifically want the sound reversed on a phone, the guides for iPhone and Android cover that path.
How do you reverse a video on a desktop editor?
Every major desktop editor can flip a clip, but the control has different names. In iMovie, the reverse option lives in the clip’s speed controls — select the clip, open the speed adjustments, and enable reverse. In Premiere Pro, right-click the clip, choose Speed/Duration, and tick Reverse Speed. In DaVinci Resolve, open the clip’s retime controls (the Change Clip Speed dialog) and set it to play in reverse.
In all three, the audio attached to the clip reverses along with the picture, exactly as on phone. If the audio sits on a separate track — a music bed or a voiceover you added later — those editors won’t flip it just by reversing the video clip; that separate track needs its own reverse.
Desktop editors also let you reverse only a trimmed section: cut the clip at the in and out points first, then reverse the middle piece. That precision is the main reason to reach for a desktop app over a phone for anything beyond a quick flip.
Can you reverse only the audio and keep the video forward?
Yes — this is the reverse-speech-over-normal-footage effect, and it takes one extra step because no editor has a single button for it. Detach or extract the clip’s audio so it becomes its own track, reverse that audio file, then lay the flipped audio back under the untouched video. The picture plays forward; the sound plays backward.
The cleanest way to flip the detached audio is a free audio reverser in your browser. Export or detach the audio, drop the file into the tab, press reverse, and download the flipped WAV — then re-import it under your video. It accepts MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, and WebM, reverses locally in the browser tab on the Web Audio API so nothing uploads, and hands back a free WAV. For flipping standalone sound across every platform, see how to reverse a song.
Which method should you use to reverse a video?
Match the tool to the job. If you want the whole clip — picture and its baked-in sound — flipped together, any editor’s reverse does it. If you want only the audio backwards, you need the detach-and-reverse round trip. Here’s how the routes compare:
| Method | Reverses picture + audio? | Audio-only? | Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CapCut (phone/desktop) | Yes, in one tap | No — detach + reverse elsewhere | Free | Fast whole-clip flips on a phone |
| iMovie / Premiere / DaVinci | Yes, via speed/retime | Only if you detach the track | Free–paid | Precise section reversing on desktop |
| Browser reverser → re-import | Audio only | Yes, any file | Free | Reversing just the sound, then re-laying it under video |
| Reverse Audio PRO app | Audio only | Yes, record or import | Free; Pro $4.99 once | Recording and flipping sound in one place |
For a straight video flip, CapCut is usually fastest and costs nothing. For frame-accurate work, a desktop editor wins. And when the picture should stay forward while the sound runs backward, reverse the audio in the browser tool or the Reverse Audio PRO app — which records, reverses, and plays back on one screen, then adds speed (0.25×–3.0×), pitch (±12 semitones), ten effects, and MP3/M4A export for a one-time $4.99.
Does reversing a video lose quality?
The reversal step doesn’t. Flipping a clip only reorders the frames and audio samples that already exist and discards nothing, so a reversed clip holds exactly the data the original did. Where quality actually slips is the export: every editor re-encodes the whole project when you render, and a low-bitrate preset or a stack of effects can dull both picture and sound.
Two habits keep it clean. Export at the highest resolution and bitrate your editor offers rather than a compressed default. And when audio fidelity is the priority, reverse the sound as a lossless WAV before importing it, so the flip never rides through the video encoder.
Reversal is also symmetric: run a reversed clip through Reverse again and you get the original back, frame for frame and sample for sample. The only thing that degrades a round trip is repeated lossy re-encoding — so keep intermediate audio as WAV and render to a compressed format only at the very end.