So you've been wanting to get into content creation and video editing because you see how much potential there is in this industry right now.
Literally every single business out there needs content to be able to get more customers through social media.
So it also created a lot of new jobs and opportunities in this space.
So if you want to get into video editing,
CapCut is a really good app to get started with because it's completely free and yeah, it does have some pretty advanced capabilities.
So this video,
I'm going to talk about everything you need to know as a complete beginner to be able to start editing in CapCut on your computer.
So without any further ado, let's get right into it.
So when you first open up CapCut, This is kind of what you are going to be greeted with.
This is the interface.
And the first step in order to start your project is to import some footage.
So you can either just click here on this import button or drag and drop your clips right here.
So I'm just going to click on import.
and then as you can see I got all the stuff that I want to import right here all my videos and
audio so I'm just going to select all of that click on import and as you can see now I got all
of these clips inside of the software.
software.
In order to actually get them onto your timeline,
so you can start editing it, all you need to do is just either click on this little plus icon next to the certain clip.
And by the way, if you want to, you know, look through your footage first, you can just click on here, scroll through it.
But yeah, just click on this plus, and then it's going to add it onto your timeline.
Or you can also just go ahead and drag and drop it onto your timeline like this.
And another option that you can do as well,
if you want to only import of your clip is to go to where you want to have the clip start for example here and you can either
press I on your keyboard to set the endpoint or you can use this little thing here drag it over
there and then you can have this clip start here for example then you want to go to where you want
to end for example here and either press O or
you where to set the alt point or again drag it on the edge and then you will be able
to again drag and drop it and now you can see it only imported that certain specific part of my clip.
Now the next thing that you want to make sure to set up in order to get the right result that you are looking for is to set the aspect ratio of
your project.
So you can set that right here.
As you can see,
currently my timeline and my project is set to a 9 x 16 aspect ratio,
which would be ideal for things like Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, or you know, just stories even.
But if you want to change this,
you can either go to,
you know,
16 by nine to get the horizontal look, or even if you click original it will just use the original aspect ratio of your clip.
If you want to change the frame rate of your timeline you can just click anywhere
outside of your clips then this details section will come up here on the right side then you can click on modify.
And here you're able to manually set the frame rate as well.
So example, I'm looking for 24 frames per second timeline.
So I can set that up right here.
You can also name it, by the way, your project.
So I'm just going to name this one a test project.
And you can also choose where you want it to save.
You can also change things like the ratio, the resolution.
So for example, to be accustomed to the I set that in here.
You can choose your color space,
but for most beginners,
I just recommend leaving these as they are aside from the resolution and the frame rate because other stuff you don't really need to touch.
Now let's go over the software layout so you get a little bit more familiar with it.
So the first and most important part in my opinion is you're gonna timeline.
So that is basically this area right here.
This is where you are going to be doing the majority of the cutting,
you know, putting clips on the timeline, removing clips, making different cuts, editing out sections and so on.
You can also adjust how zoomed in your timeline by either using your mouse pad on your laptop or by pressing your
by your command or control and the plus and minus buttons on your keyboard or you can even
come right here to the right side of the timeline and then use this little slider to change your zoom.
You also have a lot of different settings here on your timeline that are very useful.
One of them is the undo and redo button so for example if you want to undo a change
you can just click on this or press ctrl plus c on your keyboard but you can see this you know
just undid a change or if you want to redo something then you can just press on the redo right here.
They also have the split button here which will allow you to split a clip in half if you click it
like so so you can see now this actually turn into two different clips.
They also have the delete left button, which will delete the clip from the left of your playhead, which is this right here.
or you also have the delete right which will delete the clip from the right of your playhead.
Now the next part of the software interface which is just as important is the player.
So this is where you're going to be able to see what you are actually doing and editing.
This is where you can preview your edit.
You can you know start and stop the playback by either clicking on this play button or using spacebar.
If you come to this top right corner of your player section then you can also turn on things like the color more advanced like color scopes.
going to be using those in this tutorial but you can turn those on you can change the preview quality
so you can have your software either prioritize the quality of your playback or the performance so
for example if you don't have a super strong computer you might want to put this onto
performance priority so your playback is going to be still smooth and you can also
export a steel frame from where your playhead is currently and basically you
can export the frame that you currently have as a PNG or JPEG file that you see right here.
You can also make your playback full screen if you click on this full screen button right there or minimize it.
And in this player section you will also be able to see.
how long your project is in total right now and where your playhead is at right now.
Now on the right side here you will have the details around your project
or if you select or highlight a certain clip you will have different settings and adjustments that you can make to that clip right here.
So you will have video adjustments, speed adjustments, animation, Or even color adjustments.
We cover that in more depth a little bit later on and then on the left side You also have your media panel.
So this is where you will have you know all the clips that you imported You will have the different spaces on your computer your library
and you also have your audio library here to add songs and music, sound effects to your clip.
You also have text right here so you can choose from a variety of different text templates and
text that you want to add to your clips.
Then you will have stickers where you can add different stickers onto your video.
You will have effects, transitions, filters, for example of your clip or adjustments as well.
So one of the things you will be doing most of the time is actually changing the scale of your videos to
make sure that it fits the certain format that you are editing in.
So for example you can see that even on this 16x9 timeline this clip doesn't fill up my screen fully.
So one thing you can do is either you can just grab these edges and scale up your footage that way so it fills up the entire screen.
Or you can also come here on the right side to video,
basic, then position and size, scale, and here you can zoom in more on your footage or zoom out.
You can also change the position.
right here so you can either use these two sliders to change and make
adjustments on the different axes of your clips or for example if I move this
160 pixels to the right on the axes then it will move to the right or you can
also just grab your footage like this and move it to wherever you want to.
You here.
So if you wanted to make a 90 degree rotation, for example, you can do it like that.
You can change the blending modes here.
So blending modes are amazing for adding, for example, special effects.
So let me show you an example of how that would look like.
For example, here is a film burn effect.
And if I go and click on this and then go to the blend mode,
and change it to overlay you can see it adjusts the colors differently right so
basically the blending modes just change how a certain layer on top interacts
with the layer under it so for example this obviously doesn't look that good on
this but for example if I change it to screen Then it actually acts as an effect now,
so if I scale this up a little bit...
like that.
You can see now I actually added this effect because it with the screen blend mode it actually takes out the dark parts of my image and only keeps in you know those brighter areas.
Other than that here in the video settings you also have a function to stabilize your footage.
So for example if you have a clip that is not that stable you can just click on that and then it will
stabilize it for you.
These are all pretty stable clips so it won't do that much but you would basically just choose the clip that you want to stabilize click turn on and then it's going to stabilize
it for you.
seconds for it to finish but you know you will get more smooth looking footage
after it and you can also choose the level of stabilization so for example you can
either choose the recommended option the minimum cut so it won't zoom in as
little as humanly possible or you can also choose the most stable so here's kind of how it's done.
it looks now after stabilization.
And here's how it looks without.
Again, it's pretty similar because it was already stable footage, but trust me, it will help you a lot.
Then you also have some other options in here,
like the image enhancement, which we'll basically just try to upscale your footage to make it look just better.
You also have noise reduction,
which will help, especially if you are using phone shot video to get rid of some of the noise in your image.
You can also have this like remove video flickers, the auto reframe, and also you can add more motion blur to your footage.
Another really, really often used feature in editing, and this is a little bit more advice keyframing.
So for example,
if you had this clip right here,
right, which I'm just going to put back to normal 100% scale for now, and you wanted to have like a slow zoom in on it, then you could
basically just go ahead and again choose the clip that you are trying to use.
I'm just going to use this one for you.
example and then where you want your animation to begin you put your
playhead then you click on this little add keyframe button right here then you go to
where you want your animation to end for example I wanted to end
and then you can zoom in for example as much as you want and now you will see that it
actually zooms in extra to my footage.
Now because it's a drone footage it's not as apparent but you can see it's slowly scaling up and animating my zoom pretty much in that time period.
So you can see how it zoomed in over time.
all right next up I want to show you how to actually make cuts in your videos
so for example if I have this clip right here and I want to make a cut in the
middle of it then I can just press B on my keyboard to get my blade tool and I
can you know place my playhead or my mouse where I want to make the cut I'm just
going to click on it and you can see now it split that clip into two parts let's
say I want to continue from
to make another cut here then I will come back to my regular mouse or playhead by pressing A on my keyboard.
I will select this clip in the middle and then I'm just going to press delete and you can see it snapped back together on the
timeline and I was able to actually cut out that part in the middle.
So this is one way to cut clips.
Another thing you can do is you can trim them.
For example,
if you go to the edge of a clip and then start dragging in a direction,
you can see now it's cutting out that part of my clip.
It's trimming it.
You can also switch between your select mode or split mode as they call it, right here.
So you have the select, which you can access by AS.
well, and then you have the split which you can get by pressing B.
Now, if you want to change any of your keyboard shortcuts, you can always just come up here to the top where it says shortcut,
and then here pretty much for any sort of thing that you could do in the software,
you can actually go ahead and set a certain shortcut or modify it by clicking on it,
then pressing the button combination that you want to use and then that will be pretty much it.
And you can also then save your custom shortcuts and you can switch between different presets as well.
So next up is adding music into your project.
So music can be the differentiating between an average.
and boring looking at it and an amazing one.
So adding music and sound effects is crucial if you are looking to either create just a really good cinematic
video or even a really engaging short-form video or an amazing YouTube video.
So you can come here to your audio section and either choose from these songs that
they already have in here and sound effects but be aware because a lot of them are copyrighted.
So you're going to use this for any sort of YouTube videos,
or if you are going to use it for any sort of like commercial usage, I highly recommend against using these songs right here.
Instead, I recommend using a software or a service like Epidemic Sound.
Epidemic Sound was actually kind enough to sponsor this video so let me tell you a few things about how their service works.
If you are looking for a place where you can get all your music and sound effects from without having any issues with copyright or being flagged or being sued then Epidemic Sound is
kind of the right option for you because there you can just simply pay a small monthly subscription and
And will get access to their huge library where they have a ton of different kind of songs,
pretty much a song for every mood that you might be going for, and also a bunch of sound effects.
I have been personally using their service for over 5 years,
so I can definitely vouch for them,
I never had any copyright issues,
and I've always been able to find a song that What I was going for they basically allow you to pay for every song that you might need for just a small monthly fee of right
around $10 a month And instead of again having to license them one by one which might cost you thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars per
month It's just a much more affordable and better option in my opinion at the moment.
They have over 30,000 professional and they keep adding new songs literally every single week and they have over 90,000 sound effects.
The cool thing is the music and the sound effects are also neatly organized into different genres and playlists
so it's easy to find what you're looking for.
And if you want to just try them out for a month,
you can click the description down below,
sign up,
you don't even need to pay at all and you know try them out for a month you can use their music and their sound effects in
your youtube videos even and you know try it out for that period you're not going to get copyright
strike and if you like it you can just continue using them and if you don't you can just
cancel your subscription and you don't even need to pay so check out Epidemic Sound it's going to be
the first link in the description and Let's get back to your video.
So you want to add your own music to your videos Then you can just literally go ahead and pretty much just drag and drop on your timeline the the audio that you have and as you
Can see now it added it onto it.
So this is actually a sound effect and not a song But yeah,
if you want to change the volume of it,
you can even either just drag this little white line right here and change the volume that way,
or you can also come here to the right side to your basic settings,
and you can change the volume here with this slider, set the decibel that you're looking for.
You can also make a fade-in kind of like transition in the beginning and at the end as well and
exactly how many seconds you want that fade in and fade out to be.
You can also,
again, add noise reduction, but you won't need that obviously for songs and sound effects, but if it was,
for example, a voiceover, then you could click that.
They also have different voice changer settings here.
For example, if you are adding, you know, again, a voiceover, you could add these different effects.
to it and you can even change the speed of your audio right here.
Now just like that, you can also change the speed of video clips and pretty much the same thing.
If just highlight a clip and come here to speed, you can change how fast your clip plays.
So you can either put it at 2x, 1.5x, 5x or even a 500x.
if you want to, but just typing that in here.
So that's pretty cool.
It's pretty simple to change it.
You can also obviously drag to the left side and then it will put your clip into slow motion.
And another cool thing you can do is you can also do what are called basically speed ramps.
They call it a curve here, but basically it's the same thing.
Where the clip will not have constant speed throughout the entire video,
but it will have either a ramp So it will either speed up and then slow back down again or slow down and they come back to normal or any variations like
that They also have some presets in here.
So you can see for example This one if I want to apply it it made this curve in
my video so if I play this back you can see it first starts off slow then it speeds up and
then slows down again and then it goes back to normal.
So you can create some pretty creative and amazing things with speed ramping and you can also go ahead and just kind of create your own by clicking on
customized and then all these points.
basically you know just show different parts of the clip and you can speed up a certain section like
this for example if I to speed up in the beginning then I wanted to go into slow motion
like that and then come back to normal and you can also add more points by clicking on this plus
right here if you want to make more micro adjustment.
and you can see I just manipulated the way this clips looks and the way it speeds up quite drastically.
Alright, next up let's move on to adding some text to your video.
So if you want to add just a normal text, you can come here to the text menu, then just add the default text.
and you are going to be able to obviously change them the different settings of it
right here first of all you can change the actual text right properties you can
change the different fonts that you are using so for example I can use this one
you can scale it up or make it smaller or you can also adjust the font and you can make all the different text adjustments,
right?
I'm sure you have used the word before or any of these different softwares where you have to deal with letters.
So I'm not going to go too deep into that.
You can customize your style.
You can also change the opacity, which will basically affect how see-through, so to say, your text is.
And you can also adjust by the way, the opacity of any kind of clip.
So for example,
if you have two clips on top of each other,
like this,
let's say,
and then you adjust the opacity of the clip on top,
like this, you can see how, you know, you can half see-through the clip on top.
So that's how layers work, basically.
Whatever layer is on top is what always gets priority.
That's the one you see on screen.
And if you lower the opacity of a layer, it will be more see-through.
If you make the opacity higher, it will be less see-through.
But going back to our text,
aside from being able to add all these effects,
like even adding a drop shadow to it,
you can also go ahead and add- these different text bubbles so you can just go through all these templates,
choose one that you like, you can you know download it like that and add it on to it.
I'm personally not a fan of most of these so I wouldn't recommend using most of them but there are some pretty cool ones as well and you can also add
effects to it so for example if I wanted to add you know any of these.
Well, I can just pretty easily do that.
Another thing you can do is animate your text.
So if you come here to animation, you can choose the in and out animation on your text as well.
So let's just take a look at this slide up one.
As you can see, it added this animation in the beginning.
But there are honestly just so many different ones.
Like if I wanted to add this this one, I can do that.
And same thing goes for the out animation.
If I want to add this one at the end, I can just click on it and add it.
Now you don't have to necessarily start a text from scratch.
You can also come here to text templates and you can see if you hover your mouse over it,
you can preview how it kind of looks and then just go ahead download it.
If you like it, you can add it onto your timeline and customize it to pretty much whatever you want.
So I'm just going to call it the ocean, how creative.
And again, you can change default.
from there you can change the size of it and so on but it gives you a
template and an animation to kind of speed up your workflow a little bit.
Now when it comes to color grading your footage you can simply just select your clip and
either come here to adjustment and then here you can make your more like
pro adjustments for example you can
play around with the curves to add more contrast to it by adding an S curve for example like this.
You can come to your color wheels and you know add different tints to different part of your image
like if I wanted to add some more orange to the shadows I can do that with the color wheels
or if you wanted to go ahead and play around with the HS where you can literally adjust the hue,
the saturation, luminance of a certain color on your screen.
I can do that so I could change how blue my blue is and all of that stuff.
So you can actually do some pretty advanced editing right here.
I'm not going to go too deep into that because that alone would take up like an album.
pretty much if we went super deep but yeah or you can also just do some more basic adjustments
here like changing the temperature of your footage, changing the hue, the saturation, the brightness, right, adding more contrast and so on.
And they also have these filters.
So if you come here to filters,
you can see that,
you know,
you can click on any of them,
apply it,
and then it will pretty much be like an Instagram filter just instantly added onto your footage, and then you get a completely different look.
And if you click the plus button right there, you can see it added it on top of it as a layer.
So pretty much it's just going to affect whatever is under it, right?
So if you wanted to only affect this clip, you could just...
only on top of that.
But you wanted to effect this one as well, you could just drag it out so that it affects this one as well.
And of course, you can also change the strength of the filter.
So for example, here, I think this is a bit too strong, so I could make it like this.
And you can see now we've got quite a nice, you know, look.
Now, another thing that's important to know about the layers is you can actually enable and disable certain tracks or
layers by clicking on this little icon right here.
For example,
to make it a bit more apparent,
you this is the before,
this is the after,
you can also lock a layer,
so if you don't want to mess up anything once you made some effects or changes,
then you can just lock that layer in until you want to.
And then they also have this mute clip audio here.
So if you want to mute a certain track,
then you can just click that and then none of those clips on that track will have any audio.
Next up, let's talk about transitions, which are kind of close to filters.
So basically transitions are just a way of transitioning between two clips,
so for example, you know, they have like so many different transitions honestly that you could choose from.
A lot of them are a little like weird and will make your footage look kind of cheap,
but there are also a lot of really good ones.
So for example,
I don't know,
let's just look at this white flash one I'm going to download that and then I can just drag and drop it here
between two clips and you can see now instead of just regularly cutting from one clip to another
it actually cuts with this little light flicker as well and like I said they have literally like
so many of these it's not even funny.
Next up we have the effects so So effects are also something that they have plenty of here.
You could just keep scrolling through these and yeah,
these are also something that worked the same way as the transitions pretty much, except they don't actually go in between clips.
They go over them, right?
So example, if I wanted to add this blur effect.
I can just click it,
add it here,
and you can see it created this effect layer,
and I can change how long it is, and whatever is under this layer is going to be affected by that certain effect, right?
So example,
this is a blur one,
so I could change the blur amount,
I could change the blur rotation,
And you can even use keyframes right here to animate the effect the same way we did with the zoom All right now,
let's talk about actually creating something that's a talking head video, right?
So for example,
I have this short form clip right here I'm going to first of all change the aspect ratio now to 9 by 16
So it actually fills up the entire screen and let's Captions onto it, right?
So I could literally just click on there right now come to text,
come here to auto captions,
and then it's going to basically,
you know,
like, you can choose the language, and then you can click on create, and it's going to just create captions for that
entire talking head section.
So just like that, it created the text for you.
Now you can change the font size as well.
You can change the font that you are using, right?
So super, super simple.
You can add like an outline to it.
If you want to, you can add a drop shadow to make it, like, easier to eat.
And like that, you are able to add captions onto your video super quickly.
Now, if there's any mistake in the caption, you can just select that certain part and then add it into it.
Another thing I think is really cool in CapCut is this cutout function.
So for example,
if you click here on auto cutout and you have a human being on your screen,
it's going to be able to actually like analyze your clip.
so you can put other stuff in the background as well.
It of works like a green screen but without you actually needing to have a green screen.
Now it's not going to be perfect 100% of the time but it does work pretty well.
So let's just wait for it to finish and let me show you how it looks.
So you can see now it cut out my background.
Now I have this Clip of the dolphins in the background.
I can scale this up and now if I play it back you can see it actually did a pretty good job.
Now it's struggling a little bit there on the bottom but you know if I just scale up this clip maybe a bit more and hide
that part it will actually look you know pretty decent.
They also have a tracking functioning in here so for example if you wanted to stick a text to a certain
moving object you can do that pretty easily and honestly so many more.
Now last but not least I want to talk about a couple more advanced settings on your
timeline right here so first of all you can record a voiceover by clicking on
this right here then you have your like main track magnet right here.
turn that off.
Basically, then your timeline just won't just like snap together.
So this is it with turn off.
And then if you have it turned on, then it just snaps in together like that.
You also have auto snapping, which is basically just going to like snap things into place when you drag it up.
For example, image.
like an imaginary line between these two clips right here if I wanted to like paste
it exactly there you know it's kind of hard to do it with it turned off but if
you turn on the auto snapping then it's just going to snap there into place automatically so I recommend keeping that on.
Alright so once you're happy with your project all that's really left for you to do is to click here on active export,
and then you can name your project right here.
You can choose where you want it to export.
You can choose your exporting settings.
So example, 1080p, you can choose the recommended bit rate or make it higher, lower, customize it.
That's just going to be like how high quality your footage is.
If you want to go for the best, you know, go for higher, you can choose your codec here, your format.
MP4 or MOV, you can choose your frame rate as well, you can choose to export audio or not.
and then you can also export your captions if you want to,
and even run a copyright check,
then you can just click on export and it's going to basically export your project onto wherever you need to.
And then after that, you can just upload it to YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or whatever you want.
So I hope this video was overall helpful for you.
If you want to see more CapCut tutorials as well on my channel, then definitely let me know.
And if you want to just again,
learn more about video editing, content creation, and even making money with this skill set, then definitely go ahead.
and also check out Epidemic Sound if you need some music.
So, hope you enjoyed and I will see you in the next one.
