Convert a Video to Black and White

Make a video black-and-white locally

Use this tool when you need a quick monochrome version of a clip: a classic black-and-white cutaway, a sepia social preview, a blue cyanotype treatment, or a half-faded desaturation pass. The video stays in your browser. The page builds an ffmpeg colorchannelmixer graph from the controls, runs it locally, and returns a playable video plus a download link.

Worked example

For a punchy black-and-white clip, choose the High-contrast B&W preset or use:

• Gray mix: bt709
• Strength: 100
• Tone: none
• Contrast: 1.45
• Quality: balanced
• Keep the audio track: on

For an old-photo look, try the Sepia preset. For a faded colour-to-mono transition, set Strength to 50; the output keeps half of the original colour while still taking on the selected tone.

What the controls mean

Gray mix picks how red, green and blue become luma. bt709 is the HD/sRGB default, bt601 matches older SD weighting, average treats all channels equally, and the red, green and blue options mimic darkroom colour filters. Strength is a true 0–100 blend between the original and the monochrome result. Tone adds sepia, warm, cool or cyanotype colouring to the gray values in the same filter pass. Contrast appends an eq=contrast= stage only when it is not 1. Quality sets the H.264 CRF/preset trade-off, and Keep the audio track can be disabled for a silent-film output.

Limits and edge cases

The browser cap is 25 MB so ffmpeg-wasm has enough memory to decode, filter and re-encode the clip. Resolution and frame rate are preserved; this tool changes colour only. MP4, MOV, M4V and MKV outputs keep their container when possible. WebM and less common inputs are written as MP4 because this block always encodes H.264 video. If you need a specific output container or codec, run a video transcode/remux tool after this grayscale pass. A black-and-white video is not automatically much smaller than the original because the picture is still fully re-encoded.

FAQ