AI Video Editing in Action: Create Pro Short Videos with CapCut from Scratch

CapCut is currently the most popular video editing tool in China, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Its AI features have made a leap in progress over the past year, and even many professional video creators use CapCut for their daily editing.

Overview of CapCut's Core AI Features

**Smart Subtitles**: Automatically recognizes speech in videos and generates subtitles with over 95% accuracy. Supports multiple languages like Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean, and can automatically line break and segment sentences.

**AI Cutout**: Removes video backgrounds with one click, achieving effects comparable to professional green screens. Perfect for product showcases, background replacement, or creating creative composite videos.

**AI Color Grading**: Automatically analyzes the footage and applies the optimal color scheme. Even without understanding color theory, you can make your footage look professional.

**Smart Cropping**: When you need to convert a landscape video to portrait (or vice versa), the AI automatically tracks the main subject to ensure important content isn't cropped out.

**AI Audio Enhancement**: Noise reduction, volume leveling, and voice optimization—making audio recorded on a phone achieve decent quality.

Creating a Short Video from Scratch: The Complete Process

Step 1: Determine the Topic and Script

Before you start filming, use AI to help write your script. Open ChatGPT or Qwen and input: "Help me write a 60-second short video script. The topic is [your topic], the style is [informational/funny/tutorial], and the target platform is [Douyin/Xiaohongshu]." The AI will provide a complete shot-by-shot script, including scene descriptions and voiceover copy.

Step 2: Prepare Materials

Gather materials based on the script. This can include your own footage, screen recordings, image assets, or using CapCut's built-in stock library. If you need specific visuals, you can create them using AI image generation tools like Midjourney.

Step 3: Import and Rough Cut

Open CapCut and import all your materials. Arrange the clips on the timeline in the order of the script and remove any unnecessary segments. You don't need to be frame-perfect at this stage; the goal is to ensure the content order is correct and the overall duration is roughly appropriate.

Step 4: AI Subtitles and Voiceover

Use the "Smart Subtitles" feature to automatically generate subtitles. Check and correct any recognition errors (especially for proper nouns). If a voiceover is needed, you can use CapCut's built-in AI voiceover feature and select a suitable voice style.

Step 5: Effects and Transitions

Add transition effects to connect different shots, add text templates to highlight key information, and use AI color grading to unify the overall style. CapCut's template library has a vast collection of ready-made effects and text animations; applying them is much more efficient than designing from scratch.

Step 6: Music and Export

Add background music (CapCut has a large library of royalty-free music), adjust the volume balance (ensuring the voice is clear), and finally choose the appropriate resolution and bitrate for export. Douyin recommends 1080×1920 portrait, while Bilibili recommends 1920×1080 landscape.

Efficiency Tips

Make good use of CapCut's "Template" feature—find a video style template you like, directly replace the materials and text, and you can have a finished video in minutes. As you gain experience, you can create your own templates to further improve efficiency.

After learning the basics of AI editing, in the next chapter we will explore more cutting-edge areas—using tools like Runway and Pika to generate videos directly from text.