CapCut Review: Your Search for Video Editing App Ends Here [2022 Updated]

Videos are everywhere nowadays. Have you ever wondered why people become capable video editors overnight or just a swipe-up when watching videos on YouTube or Tiktok? Seemingly, they have the ability to turn these clips into complete videos in the blink of an eye and even add some visual effects that you might think should be finished with some video editing software Pro in post-production. Plus, their videos probably are creative in a way that surprises you.

Updated Info: The methods for using CapCut on PC have been newly discovered, check our guide on how to use CapCut on PC for more info. And you may also be interested in the 10 best CapCut alternatives for PC.

It is time to forget the cliche that video editing has a high threshold. CapCut is here, and with it, the chance to set off your video editing journey comes. It dedicates to simplifying complex processes and illustrating concepts in video-making for people who have less professional skills and theoretical stuff to create fantastic videos on their smartphones anytime, anywhere. CapCut is one of the 20 Best Video Editing Apps in 2022, just like KineMaster, except that it’s used as the default video editing app for the popular video-sharing platform TikTok. Please read on to learn more about it.

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Pros and Cons

CapCut is amazing, however, compared to some professional and full-featured video editing software running on Windows or Mac such as Adobe Premiere Pro, it still has a long way to go in terms of advanced tools and effects. Here I’d like to list some of its pros and cons.

These insufficiencies might have cast gloom on your video editing plans, but there is much to look forward to on other sides, such as text, B-roll (multiple overlays), audio editing, and special effects; there are lots to explore and much to expect.

1. Common Video Editing Functions

As an easy-to-use App, Capcut offers almost all video editing tools in a clean user interface. From splitting to combining many clips, from changing video format to adding canvas, from speeding to reversing the clip, you can finish all the above within a few taps on its magnetic timeline. Furthermore, in its latest release, the speed curve is available, by which you can add a ramp to make a smooth transition of your videos.

Here I want to introduce a surprising feature it offers, overlay. It allows you to put additional clips over the main primary footage. Of course, the clips applied can be scaled up and down by pinching to zoom on the screen and can be trimmed down in the same way you do to the primary clip. Other common practices of CapCut overlay include: CapCut green screen and adding background in CapCut.

2. Audio Editing

CapCut includes a rich music library with exclusive copyrighted songs. If you are not satisfied with the music it offers, you can import songs from your device and extract audio from existing videos. Besides, it provides a wealth of sound effects. For your convenience, CapCut sets a search bar and a favorite button for the sound effects on the tip of your tongue. The same to overlay, editing the audio track separately includes adjusting the volume, setting where the audio starts and ends, cutting out the part of the audio you want, and so on.

Surprisingly, there is a match-out tool to add beats. You can choose either to add them by yourself or by CapCut automatically.

But if you want to change the pitch of the added audio track, reduce the sound exposure, or improve the audio quality as some Pro software does, I’ll say that hope we will find those tools in its future versions to come.

3. Text

Text can be informative; video with text can be captivating. That’s the reason why many video editing Apps try to offer copious text editing tools to make sure that creating stunning captions is possible. It is a great point, but with that comes the question, How to quickly integrate those tools to make the pattern we want.

CapCut creatively presets templates for text editing to prevent you from getting lost in a series of elaborate and necessary tabs, such as adjusting font sizes, changing different styles, and trying multiple bubbles, and thus the process will become more efficient.

Besides, if you get tired of adding text manually, please try the Voiceover in the audio editing section and the Auto captions tool together. More precisely, CapCut will create a caption layer when you tap Auto captions, and all of the generated captions will be split up into their own graphic layer at the exact time code that they are spoken.

You can delete them, move them, or cut to split and create another caption from the existing caption. If you don’t want to edit only one caption individually each time, then use Batch Edit to give all your captions a one-off review in one scrolling box. You can also stylize them together by ticking to decide whether to apply the style to all or not.

With those huge time savers, I believe that no one will be stingy with praise after using CapCut’s ingenious way of text processing.

4. Stickers and Special Effects

Let me introduce these two tools together because they are both used to modify the presentation of a video.

1) Stickers

CapCut has an advantage in allowing us to edit our videos just like we do to our photos, and the same goes with stickers. It categorizes stickers according to their themes. Besides the most used emoji, we have stickers including snowflakes, stars, arrows, and some time-featured or themed ones, such as vlog, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Importing pictures from your device as stickers are welcomed, but only in JPG and PNG format. Unfortunately, CapCut doesn’t set a search bar or a favorite button here. If you like to use stickers frequently, you may feel a little dazzled by so many choices on offer.

2) Special Effects

There are two kinds of special effects—video effects and body effects. Video effects are added to the whole video. That is, you can choose to apply a video effect to the main video or the overlay, or both. While body effects, as the name suggests, will be applied to the human body or certain parts of the human body in the video. CapCut will first detect and identify and then add the effects around.

CapCut comes with hundreds of special video effects like CapCut 3D zoom, CapCut blur, etc. You can overlay several effects on the same video clip and make adjustments separately to make your videos look vibrant.

5. Filters and transition

1) Filters

How you color grade dramatically affects how people feel about what they’re watching. But as I mentioned previously, CapCut does not carry advanced color grading features. How does CapCut strike a balance between the two?

Filters are the answer.

CapCut has various predefined filters, which you can adjust according to your preferences. Compared to making a new one by yourself, using filters requires less time and thus accelerates your workflow. Both primary clips and overlays can be added filters.

2) Transition

A transition, a split-second clip smoothly connecting one shot to another, is another feature that CapCut offers. It has a variety of transition options from basic, camera, MG to effect and mask, which helps you seamlessly hide your cut to another clip.

Remember that you can add merely one transition between two primary clips, so choosing one that suits your video best is critical. Since you cannot add transitions directly to the overlays, you may use a devious method of creating a video with a transition first and adding this video as an overlay.

6. Actual Editing Experience

What exactly are we talking about when we talk of the video editing experience? Editing techniques? Creativity? Or practice?

In my eyes, CapCut has a user-friendly interface that does not fully stand for a complete editing project. You might feel lost in its rich tools and don’t know where to start; you might feel less challenged facing its convenience; you might be turned off from the repeated steps. Here I have two tips to help you use CapCut better.

Firstly, try as many tools as possible. This leads you to some efficient methods to make editing faster and easier on one side, for instance, the speech-to-text function. On the other side, you will be receiving some unexpected discoveries through repeated practices of multiple effects.

Secondly, keep checking every a few edits to see how the video presents. Many awesome video editing effects can be easily achieved in CapCut, even for beginners, such as the smooth slow-motion effect implemented with CapCut velocity edit.

By default, CapCut has watermarks in its exports, but CapCut watermarks can be easily removed.

It will help you easily figure out the mistakes or redundant information and correct them as soon as possible for your video. Otherwise, you may face a tricky situation, like you have to make a large-scale redo when a video is nearly finished. You surely can make it through because CapCut saves your progress under a working network connection automatically and allows you to undo an edit anytime, but you will have a lot to do if you decide to put all revisions altogether. That’s why I always recommend it.

Additional Video Guide: Best CapCut Templates

If you are a beginner in CapCut video editing, don’t forget to try CapCut templates! Check out the best trending CapCut templates from our video.

Should I try it?

CapCut is versatile, innovative, and simple to use. However, I would not define it as 100 percent perfect. Generally speaking, it depends on what you need, how CapCut can help you, and which phase you are in as a video editor.

The important thing is, the CapCut app is completely free to use, and the application is safe. So the conclusion is, CapCut is worth a try.

If you are a beginner and have some interest in video editing, I strongly recommend CapCut as it is free to use and provides quick access to common features. If you already have some knowledge of how to edit a video, CapCut can be a great help in transforming your idea into a video with a few tabs. If you are already a video editor at the professional level, then stick to your now-using video software and wait to see what features CapCut would launch in the future.