Reverse a video so it plays backwards, on your phone

Overview

Pick a clip and choose what to do with its sound: reverse it along with the picture, or drop it and keep the video silent. Tap Save and iEdit builds a new video that runs from the final frame back to the first. The output is re-encoded with the phone's hardware encoder in H.264 or HEVC at the original resolution, and the recording's location, device and date metadata are carried over to the new file.

Reversing is harder than it looks, because a video is stored to be read forwards: to play it backwards every frame has to be decoded and the order turned around. iEdit does this in chunks, decoding a section, writing it in reverse and moving on, so memory use stays flat whether the clip is ten seconds or ten minutes long. Progress and Cancel are shown throughout, and the job continues in the background with a notification when done.

Reverse makes the classic rewind effects: a jump that returns to the ground, spilled coffee that leaps back into the cup, a sandcastle rebuilding itself. Combined with Loop it gives a back-and-forth clip, and inside the video editor a single clip can be reversed as part of a larger edit. Everything runs on the device, so nothing leaves your phone and the tool works offline.