How to Turn a Video Into a Boomerang
- Select your video
Drag a video onto the upload area, or click Select Video. MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV all work, including clips straight from your phone's camera roll.
- Pick the moment
Drag the handles on the timeline around the moment you want to bounce. The first two seconds are picked for you, and two or three seconds of one clear movement makes the best boomerang.
- Choose the speed and the bounces
Play it at normal speed, in slow motion, or up to twice as fast, and choose how many times it goes forwards and back. The line under the options tells you how long the result will be.
- Make it and download
Click Make Boomerang. The finished boomerang plays right on the page, and you can download it as MP4 or WebM or share it straight from your phone.
What is a boomerang video?
A boomerang is a short clip that plays forwards, then backwards, then forwards again, so a single moment bounces back and forth on repeat. A glass clinks and un-clinks, a jump lands and springs back up, a wave rolls in and pulls itself out again. Instagram made the effect famous with the Boomerang mode in its camera, and it has stayed one of the most recognisable looks on Stories, Reels and TikTok.
Make a boomerang from a video you already took
Instagram's Boomerang works on clips you record in the app's own camera, not on a video already sitting in your camera roll, and the iPhone's Bounce effect only works on Live Photos. That is the gap this tool fills: open any video you have, pick the moment, and turn it into a boomerang after the fact. The result is an ordinary MP4, so you can post it to Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp or anywhere else that takes video.
Picking the moment
The best boomerangs are short and have one clear movement in them: a toast, a hair flip, a ball thrown and caught, confetti in the air. Two or three seconds is plenty, because the clip is shown twice in every bounce, forwards and back. Hold the camera still if you can, since any shake doubles back on itself too. A longer stretch works, but past about ten seconds it starts to read as a rewind rather than a bounce, and the page tells you when you get there.
How the bounce is made
Playing a clip forwards is easy for software. Playing it backwards is not, because video is compressed so that most frames are stored as changes from the frame before, and a player can only ever step forwards from a full picture. So VidShift reads the way back in short sections from the end of your clip, decodes each section forwards and writes its frames out in the opposite order, the same way the reverse video tool does. Only one section is in memory at a time, which is what lets a boomerang be made on a phone.
The first and last frames of the clip are shown once at each turn rather than twice, so the bounce does not stall at either end. Only one bounce is ever encoded: every bounce after it is the same picture at a later time, so it is copied rather than made again, and ten bounces take barely longer than one.
Speed, bounces and sound
Normal speed keeps the moment as it happened. Twice as fast gives the quick, snappy bounce most people picture when they think of a boomerang, and slow motion turns a splash or a jump into something you can watch every drop of. The number of bounces sets how long the video runs: three bounces of a two-second clip at normal speed is about twelve seconds.
Boomerangs are silent, the same as Instagram's, because a soundtrack played forwards and backwards every couple of seconds is noise. To put music under yours, use add music to video once it is made.