To make a reaction video, record yourself watching the video with your own camera and microphone, then put both recordings in an editor, line them up and choose how each moment looks. In ReactionCut that editing is five steps in your browser, and the cuts between you and the video are placed from your voice.
Never edited one before? This is the whole thing in order: what to record, what to click, and what to check before you upload. About thirty minutes the first time. Nothing here costs money, and the editing happens on your own computer.
In a hurry? Open the editor and press Try a demo project. It makes two short clips on the spot, so you can walk all five steps before you record anything of your own.
Three things, and you probably have all of them already. No account, no card, no install.
Everything runs inside the browser tab: nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded. Chrome and Edge are tested from start to finish. Other browsers usually work. The editor needs a window of at least 1280 by 660, so it does not open on a phone.
As a file on your disk. A film, an episode, a music video, a trailer: the editor never asks what it is, it only sees a picture and a sound.
A built-in laptop webcam is enough to start with. Headphones matter more than the camera does: they keep the video’s sound out of your microphone.
If the file is already on your disk, use that. It is sharper than any screen recording, it is smaller, and it stays perfectly smooth, because the editor reads it straight off your drive rather than through a player.
If you can only stream it, record your screen instead: OBS Studio, Display Capture for the picture and Desktop Audio for the sound. Expect a bigger file and a slightly softer image, and remember that the platform’s terms still apply to you.
ReactionCut does not record for you, it edits what you bring. Any recorder will do, and OBS Studio is free and does the job in five clicks:
Wear headphones. Through speakers your microphone records the film as well. You get an echo that cannot be removed, and the automatic cutting fires on the film instead of on you.
Two files are enough to start: the editor uses the sound inside each recording as it is. But if your camera file also carries the film’s sound, the editor hears both at once. It still cuts, only less precisely, and you can never turn the film down under your voice.
So hand it your microphone on its own when you can. Either record it as a separate track, or pull it out afterwards with VLC, which is free and already on most machines: Media → Convert / Save…, add your camera recording, set Profile: Audio – MP3, and save it as microphone.mp3.
A hand span from your mouth, headphones on, and the room quiet.
Across the desk, on speakers: thin voice with the film bleeding into it.
Honest note: yes, this is five extra minutes, and it is the one part of the process that is not inside the editor. If your recorder can already write a separate audio file, skip straight past it.
Two cards: the recording of you and the one you watched. Drop them anywhere on the page, in any order. Each card reads the length, the picture size, the weight on disk and the data rate on the spot, and draws the sound wave under a film strip you can slide through to check you grabbed the right take.
Your camera started before the video did, and this step fixes it. Both sound waves sit one above the other: your camera on top, which never moves, and the video under it, which you drag. Press Play, or Loop 5s to hear the same five seconds while you nudge it by a frame, a tenth or a second.
Three ways to find the spot, and every shortcut →
A project has three moments, and your microphone decides which one is on screen. Each gets its own look: take a ready-made one and it lands in one click, or start on an empty picture and build it yourself. A look can also get a second and third version, and the clips take turns between them. Save project keeps all of it for your next video.
These ship with the editor. Click one while a look is selected and it becomes that look: shape, position, size, border, soft edge, text, images and the sound mix, all at once.
They come in sets of three that belong together, so one click can build the whole video. A ready look also carries the layout it was made in, and putting it on a look moves that look to the same layout, so you get exactly the picture on the tile. All eight sets, side by side
You work on the picture itself: drag to move, pull a corner to resize, turn it with the knob above, double-click to type on it.
This is the one part that takes real time, because your own machine is doing work that normally happens on someone else’s server. Before it starts you are told how much disk space it needs and whether you have it, and while it runs you can watch the frames being drawn.
Every look in one pass, at the resolution of your source, 30 fps, every frame a keyframe.
The cuts are already placed when you arrive. The editor read your microphone and switched look every time you started and stopped talking. Review them first: click a clip to jump to it, drag an edge, delete one you do not want, or turn any clip into a different look with one click. Undo goes all the way back.
If that is all you wanted, you are finished. When the timeline is still exactly what the automatic cut made, saving copies the pieces together instead of encoding them again, so it takes seconds and the picture is untouched.
Add a transition, a title, music or a second layer and it becomes a real render: the video is drawn frame by frame, which takes longer than a copy. That is how every editor works, and none of it costs another credit. Everything the editor can do
The reaction is done at step 8, but you are not tied to our cut. Every generation also hands you the full-length files it was built from, each the whole project in one look, and the timeline that joins them. Nothing has to be rendered again.
Gave a moment a second or third version? Each one is its own file too: quiet-2.mp4, quiet-3.mp4 and so on.
Everything is 30 fps and non-drop, so a timeline lands frame for frame. Names are the tools people ask about; ReactionCut is not affiliated with any of them.
Every one is easy to avoid before you record, and painful afterwards.
Your voice and the film baked together cannot be split later.
The microphone records the film too, and the cuts fire in the wrong places.
Trimming is one drag. A missing thirty seconds is a re-shoot.
The work happens in that tab, so closing it throws the video away.
Working files are big. The editor shows the number before it starts.
Chrome and Edge are checked end to end. Firefox writes audio some players refuse.
Reaction videos pick up Content ID claims, and it mostly comes down to how much of the original you show and how much of yourself you add.
The first one takes an evening because everything is new. The second takes an hour, and once you save the project, every one after that opens with your looks already set. reactioncut.com asks for an account only when you want an export without the watermark.
Open the editor, free