In this Facebook Live Tutorial, I’ll show you how to trim your Facebook Livestreams so you can edit the beginning and end of your live video.

🕒Timestamps🕒

2:06 Edit your Facebook Live video from Publishing tools

2:52 Accessing your video via Creator studio (https://business.facebook.com/creatorstudio/)

3:37 Select ‘edit video’ to get to your video

4:22 Select ‘Video trimming’ to trim

7:18: What happens to the engagement you had before the trim?

8:28 Trimming your video using Creator Studio

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How to Trim Your Facebook Livestream – Video Transcription

In this Facebook Live tutorial, I’m going to walk you through how you can trim your Facebook live stream, so if you’ve gone live on Facebook and you want to get rid of the bit at the beginning where you’re stalling or you’re waiting for the feed to come through, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that step by step.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help coaches, consultants and creative pros build and grow their business using video. I live stream a lot about live streaming. Make sure that you check out the description because I’ll put all of the timestamps and also links to any of the resources that I mention in this video.

Now let’s go over straight to my computer now, and I’m going to show you exactly how to trim your Facebook Live stream.

After you’ve live-streamed on Facebook, you’ll see that your video will sit on your page. This is one that I literally just live streamed with and typically with my Facebook live streams, I have found that I need to allow anywhere from between 30 seconds to 60 seconds to allow the feed to come through, particularly because I also multi stream, so I live stream to Facebook and to YouTube at the same time.

It’s just the amount of time that the software needs in order to kick in and for everything to talk to each other, so I’ll either be stalling and I’ll tell people to wait, or I’ll put a countdown timer on to make sure that all the feeds come through.

Now, I don’t necessarily want that on the live stream, just because, if someone’s watching it, it’s kind of just wasting their time. I want to get to the point. How do I get rid of it, given that it’s a live stream? You can trim it. I’m going to show you how to do that and where to access it, because as usual, with Facebook, everything’s a little convoluted and never straightforward, but we love Facebook.

This is a live stream and in order to edit the live stream, you actually need to go to either publishing tools or Creator Studio. From your Facebook page, after you’ve livestreamed on the left hand side, you’ll see Publishing Tools here, so go ahead and click on that. Once you’ve clicked on that, you will see Video Library, and this should be where all of your videos are, whether they’re your live streams or whether they are videos that you have uploaded to Facebook. From here, you can click on Edit Video.

The second way to access all of your content, particularly your live streams, to edit them, is from Creator Studio, and you can access Creator Studio by going directly to the link, which is business.facebook.com/creatorstudio, and then going to your content library, or you can see it from your publishing tools here. There’s a link right here that says Creator Studio. There’s no right or wrong way. It’s just different ways that you can access the same thing, so either from your publishing tools or from Creator Studio. Regardless of which way you do it, it’s going to be the same.

From publishing tools, what you want to do is you want to hover over the video that you want to edit. This is the live stream that I did, so I’m going to hover over it and the pencil will say, “Edit video.” I’m going to click on that, and this opens up the dialogue box where I can do a lot of things, but particularly I’m going to show you how to trim the video.

On the right hand side here of this box, I want to scroll down past video details, past thumbnails, distribution, subtitles. I want to pass video clipping. That’s not the same thing. Video clipping is to make many clips of the actual full live stream, not to actually trim the top, the beginning and the end of the video. You can use that, but this is not the purpose of this tutorial. Keep scrolling until you reach the bottom where it says here, “Video trimming,” and click on that. After you’ve clicked on that, then this is where you go into actually trim the video.

Now, I want to walk you through this, because it took me a little bit of playing around, and that’s me saying, playing, instead of swearing, playing around to figure out exactly how to trim it.

Now, you can play the video at the top here to see where you want to trim, and this yellow section is where you drag it in order to actually trim it. Now watch though, if you play the video, you’ll see at the bottom here, this is the timer on the video, but just because you’re playing at the top here, that doesn’t mean that this is where the video will trim from. You need to play the video to figure out, and you can scroll obviously across to see where you want to trim.

I’ve already done this, I’ve come from all sorts of places, so I just stuck together a bit. In this video you don’t have to struggle with me, but I know that I want to trim from a minute 53, because that’s how long I was stalling for. I had a minute countdown timer, and then I had some issues with getting someone to okay that it was actually working. I had a minute and 53 of not ideal, not getting to the point. I know it’s a minute 53, because I watched it in this top section. But to trim it, you’ve got to put the times in this bottom section here where it says video trimming.

Now, I need to actually put in here my minute 57, and I can also drag it from this yellow section. As I drag it, you can see the time is changing. I’m going to it now to a minute 53 actually. It’s a minute 53, that’s where it is, and that’s how you actually trim it.

I remember playing this, and then hitting save, and it wasn’t actually trimming the video and I was getting very frustrated, but make sure that you’re watching as you drag this yellow section here, that the from times, that’s when it will start and then this side as well. That’s where it will end. You watch that the times actually move here. Then, to double check at 1:52, I’m going to scroll to 1:52, and play this.

That’s exactly where I want to be. So once you’re happy with that, then what you do is you select Save. I’m going to go now and click Save, and what will happen now is that you will take a little bit of time. It really varies. It depends on the length of your video. It depends on Facebook, but the video will trim.

That beginning part where I’m stalling and the countdown will disappear. You’ll just see it from the part that you trimmed from, and if you trimmed the end of it, the part that you cut off at the end. Now, what happens to actual comments or actual engagement that you have? That will stay on the actual video. It doesn’t create a new video. There you go. It’s finished.

I’ve got the notification that it’s finished. It will stay on the video, but the timestamp will be 0:0, because you’ve cut out that minute, if they were talking to you from 20 seconds, it will just say 00:00, and it will show the hello and the whatever. That’s how it will look.

Now that I’ve got that notification, you always want to refresh with Facebook. I’m going to refresh it. Here’s my video. Now I’m going to click on this. Okay. It says that it’s done. You always need a minute or so. It says it’s finished trimming it, so I can go on and watch it. There it is. Didn’t make me a liar this time.

That’s got rid of the countdown timer and it had the countdown timer running from the beginning. There you have it. That’s exactly step by step, how you trim your Facebook live stream video. I showed you how to do it from publishing tools. If you want to do it from Creator Studio, you can as well. It’s exactly the same process.

You go to Creator Studio, you hover over the video that you want to edit, and then you go to Edit Post, and then it will stall for a little bit. There you go. Then you go through the same process. You scroll, and you go to Video Trimming. Because we’ve already trimmed this one. It won’t let me do it again unless I remove it, but I don’t want to do that. But it’s exactly the same process, whether you go through Creator Studio or you go through publishing tools.

Hopefully you found that useful. Hopefully that shows you exactly how to trim your videos, so that you can rest assured that those couple of minutes or however long it is, at the beginning, at the end, you can cut that out, so you have a succinct Facebook live stream that you can continue to share and continue to promote on your Facebook page.

Now, if you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. If you’re looking for more ways to grow your business with Facebook Live, make sure you grab a copy of my Facebook Live cheat sheets. It’s a super simple guide to get you up and streaming on Facebook Live, even if you’ve never hit record before. To get your hands on it, simply click on the link in the description box below and thanks for watching.