CapCut, explained: a free editor that fits in your pocket — and on your desk

It began as a phone app for short clips. Today it is a full timeline editor with auto-captions, keyframes, chroma key and one-tap export presets. Here is what every button actually does.

CapCut is a video editor made by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok. It runs on Android, iPhone and iPad, on Windows and macOS, and in a web browser. The core editing tools are free, there is no forced watermark on your own footage, and projects made on the phone can be picked up on the desktop version when you sign in with the same account.

The reason it caught on is simple: the layout is the same everywhere. A preview window at the top, a timeline at the bottom, and a toolbar that changes depending on what you have selected. Learn that one pattern and the rest of the app opens up — the difference between the mobile and desktop builds is screen space, not concepts.

The tools are not the hard part. Deciding which two seconds to keep is the hard part — and CapCut is fast enough that you can actually try three versions before lunch. — The Editing Desk

What follows is not a feature list. It is a working order: what to press first, what to ignore until later, and the handful of settings that separate a clip that looks sharp on a phone screen from one that looks like it was posted through a fax machine.

Getting started: from install to your first timeline in ten minutes

A guided tour of the workspace, the settings that are painful to change later, and the exact order of taps for your first cut.

Install CapCut from your device’s official app store, or the desktop installer from the official site. On first launch it asks for access to your photos and media — that permission is what lets you import clips, so grant it. Signing in is optional for editing, but it is what syncs projects between your phone and computer.

1. Open the app and press New Project

   On mobile this is the large + New project button on the home screen. On desktop it sits in the top-left of the start window. The media picker opens immediately.

2. Select your clips in the order you want them

   Tap clips in sequence — CapCut numbers them as you go and lays them down in that order. Choosing the rough order now saves dragging later. Confirm with Add.

3. Set the aspect ratio before you decorate anything

   Open Ratio in the toolbar (desktop: the project settings dropdown above the player). Pick 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, 16:9 for YouTube, 1:1 for a square feed post.

   Change this after you have positioned text and overlays and you will have to reposition all of them.

4. Learn the playhead

   Drag the timeline left and right — the clips move under a fixed vertical line. That line is the playhead, and it is where splits, freezes and new elements are inserted. Pinch (mobile) or use Ctrl + scroll (desktop) to zoom the timeline in for finer cuts.

5. Make your first cut

   Tap a clip so it gets a white border, park the playhead where you want the cut, then press Split. Select the piece you do not want and press Delete. That single loop is 80% of editing.

6. Trim the ends instead of splitting

   Drag the white handle at either end of a clip inward to shorten it. This is non-destructive: drag back out and the frames return. Nothing is ever removed from the original file on your device.

7. Reorder by dragging

   Press and hold a clip until it lifts, then drag it left or right. Neighbouring clips close the gap automatically on the main track.

8. Save the project

   Mobile saves continuously — backing out to the home screen keeps the project in the list. Desktop autosaves too, but Ctrl+S is still a good habit.

9. Do a throwaway export

   Export a ten-second test early so you know the pipeline works and you can see how the edit looks on the actual platform. Details are on page 05.

The editing tools: what each button does and when to reach for it

Split, speed, overlay, mask, chroma key and keyframes — the six tools that account for nearly every effect you have admired in someone else’s edit.

Select a clip and the toolbar fills with verbs. They look like a lot, but they fall into three families: tools that change time (split, speed, reverse, freeze), tools that change space (crop, mask, overlay, transform), and tools that change values over time (keyframes). Everything else is a preset built on top of those.

Speed is where beginners and experienced editors separate. In Normal mode you drag one slider: below 1× is slow motion, above 1× is fast. Two things to watch — slowing footage below about 0.5× will look stuttery unless it was shot at a high frame rate, and speeding up multiplies any camera shake, so stabilise afterwards, not before.

Curve mode is the interesting one. It gives you a graph of speed against time with presets called Montage, Hero, Bullet, Jump Cut, Flash In and Flash Out. Pick Bullet, drop it on the frame just before an impact, and you get the slow-then-snap effect that makes an ordinary clip feel deliberate. Each preset can be edited by dragging its points, and Reset puts it back.

A keyframe stores a value at a moment. Set two different values at two moments and CapCut animates smoothly between them. This one mechanism gives you slow zooms, drifting text, fading music and travelling blurs — no presets required.

1. Select the clip and park the playhead where the move should begin

   Zoom the timeline in first. Keyframes land exactly on the playhead, so precision here pays off.

2. Press the diamond

   The keyframe button is a small diamond near the player or in the properties panel. Pressing it records the current scale, position, rotation and opacity as keyframe one.

3. Move the playhead forward, then change something

   Pinch the preview to scale up to, say, 120%. A second diamond appears automatically because you changed a value at a new time.

4. Play it back

   You now have a slow push-in. Drag either diamond along the timeline to retime the move, or tap one and press it again to delete it.

Cut on movement. A cut that lands as a hand leaves the frame is invisible; the same cut two seconds later feels like a mistake. — A rule worth stealing from film editors

Text, audio and effects: the layer that makes people stop scrolling

Auto-captions in one tap, music that lands on the beat, transitions that do not look like a 2004 slideshow, and the four colour sliders that matter.

Most social video is watched on mute, in a hurry, on a small screen. That single fact should drive every decision in this section: captions are not optional, text must be large, and effects should punctuate the edit rather than decorate every second of it.

1. Auto-captions

   Deselect everything, open Text and choose Auto captions. Pick the spoken language and let it transcribe. Every caption arrives as its own editable block on a text track.

   Always read them back. Names, slang and technical words are where the transcription slips.

2. Fix words fast

   Tap a caption block, then the pencil, and correct the text. There is usually a Batch edit view listing every line at once, which is far quicker than tapping through them one by one.

3. Style once, apply to all

   Style a single caption — font, colour, outline, background box — then look for Apply to all. Do this before you fine-tune positions.

4. Add a title

   Text → Add text gives you a free block. Drag it in the preview, drag its ends in the timeline to set how long it stays.

5. Animate it

   With the text selected open Animation: In for its entrance, Out for its exit, Loop for continuous motion. Keep durations short — 0.3 to 0.5 seconds reads as snappy, anything longer feels sluggish.

6. Try text templates

   Pre-built animated title designs. Fast and good-looking, but check they fit your ratio and stay clear of platform interface elements.

A transition lives on the join between two clips. Tap the small square icon sitting on that seam and pick from Dissolve, Slide, Zoom, Glitch, Light leaks and more, then set the duration — usually between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds. The Apply to all button copies your choice to every join in the project.

Effects are different. They come in two kinds: Video effects, which sit on their own track and colour everything beneath them for as long as the block lasts, and Body effects, which track a person in the frame. Both are trimmed by dragging the ends of their block.

Open Adjust on a clip and you get a long list of sliders. Ignore most of them at first and work in this order:

• Exposure / Brightness — get the overall level right first. Faces should be clearly visible without the highlights blowing out to pure white.
• Contrast — a small lift makes footage feel less flat. Too much and shadows turn into black holes.
• Saturation — nudge up for food and travel, down for a moodier look. Watch skin tones; they go orange first.
• Temperature — the fix for footage that came out too blue indoors or too orange under warm lamps.
• Sharpen — a light touch only, and always check on a phone screen where compression is harsher.

When one clip looks right, copy its settings to the others so the whole video matches. Consistency reads as professional far more reliably than any single dramatic grade.

Export, presets and the fixes for everything that goes wrong

Resolution, frame rate and bitrate in plain language — plus the answers to the questions that send people searching at midnight.

Export is the moment CapCut builds a single video file out of your timeline. Press the button in the top-right corner (mobile) or Ctrl+E (desktop) and you get a panel of settings. Three of them decide how your video looks; the rest you can leave alone.

• Watch the whole thing once, start to finish, without touching anything.
• Listen on headphones and again on the phone speaker.
• Read every caption for typos and check none run off the edge.
• Confirm the first three seconds work with the sound off.
• Check the final frame is not a stray black flash or an accidental half-second of nothing.
• Set the cover image from the timeline’s first tile.
• Confirm you have storage space for the exported file.