This summer a client asked me to experiment making AI videos. Without getting into the weeds on AI video generation, the thing to know is that AI doesn’t currently create long videos with many scene transitions. Instead, they typically make short, single-scene clips (known as “outputs”). Google’s Veo, which I’ve used the most, currently makes outputs 8 seconds long.

Because of this, for videos longer than the output length, the AI video still has to be edited together by a human.

My client needed a longer video, so I decided to try CapCut. My review is from the perspective of someone looking for specific results in a few areas, and is not influenced by any affiliate deals or connections to CapCut.

Are you a business owner or marketing professional who could use AI-generated video ads without the hassle of learning the tools yourself? That’s a service I offer. See examples of what I’ve made, or get in touch if you want to talk about it.

I’ve used free CapCut Online, and CapCut Desktop with a Pro subscription. They are similar, but different enough to be worth covering (mostly) separately.

Online is the simplest version. Very basic tasks are fairly intuitive to do. It can be used for free or with a subscription that unlocks extra features. It’s easy to get started quickly and is, for the most part, straightforward to use. I barely watched or read instructions and was able to cut and assemble videos and move around text and audio elements to make functional videos.

Free CapCut Online works fine for a 30-second or minute-long video that doesn’t have many tracks (more on this later) or elements beyond the video segments themselves and audio.

I would not, however, recommend it for anything even mildly complex, because it lacks some important features that are in CapCut Desktop. For example, audio elements are more clunky to adjust, and it only allows eight tracks to be stacked in the timeline. I’ve never hit a track limit with CapCut Desktop.

In case you’re wondering, the “timeline” is where you assemble a video.

“Tracks” hold individual elements like video segments, pictures, text, filters, audio, and so forth, that contribute to the finished video. They can build up quickly, so eight is not a lot.

CapCut Desktop is less clunky and more versatile in every way than the online version. There are quality of life additions like clickable sliders for easily controlling sound volume on the tracks, and it has more keyframing options. (Keyframes are used to mark the beginning and end of transitions and transformations. For example, if you want a video to slowly zoom out, this would be marked with a keyframe starting at a high level of zoom, and ending with a lower level. The video would then smoothly transition between those two values as it plays.)

Both Online and Desktop automatically save projects whenever the user clicks out of them. There is no separate save button. In many ways, this is convenient. But it does mean that if the video gets messed up for whatever reason and you don’t remember to revert the changes before exiting, you’re stuck with them. There’s no way to cancel out and just load a fresh save.

With Desktop it’s possible to get around this by duplicating a project and keeping one version as the backup save. CapCut Online does not appear to support duplicating a project, so if your one version of the video is corrupted, there’s no backup.

The saving factor aside, it’s common to need different variants of the same video, which is harder to do with Online, but easy with Desktop.

All other factors aside, the ability to duplicate a project makes it worth using Desktop instead of Online.

The short version of this section is CapCut has many small and medium-sized annoyances. Here’s the long version:

1. Although a Pro subscription covers both Online and Desktop, there’s no way to transfer a project from the Online space to the Desktop space. This can be a pain if you’ve maxed out what Online can do and have a half-finished project that you want to finish with Desktop. Instead of being able to transfer the project, you have to make it again. I just don’t start anything with CapCut Online anymore.

2. The system for renewing the Pro subscription is horrible. Here’s what happened: I didn’t know how long I would be using CapCut, so it wasn’t set to auto-renew. When it ran out, I needed to resubscribe to continue work on a video. There was a popup prompting resubscription; I followed it, and paid. However it didn’t then just renew Pro, but continued prompting for resubscription again (this time offering a discount). It took about half an hour to figure out how to sign back in so that the Pro subscription would work, but even now, I’m unclear of the correct way to do it again.

3. There are popup screens prompting updates when the system is already up to date.

4. When a video gets complicated, if you change something at the beginning, like trimming or extending a clip, it will often desynchronize everything in the timeline that comes later. If a video has text, filters, and separate audio, the number of things that need to be resynchronized for each change adds up quickly. Trimming three seconds at the beginning may require adjusting 25 elements that are now out of position.

This is no big deal for a 30 second video with a few elements. But it can quickly become unmanageable for longer videos. There is, theoretically, a way to drag and drop many elements at once, modify the beginning of the timeline, and then move the block of elements back. However, even for a video less than three minutes long, I found this nearly froze my computer (which isn’t from the 1990s).

It may look like I had a lot going on in that screenshot, but it was still a relatively simple video. There is no user-friendly way to isolate the beginning and modify it while keeping everything else together.

Based on this issue, I would not use CapCut for anything over 5 minutes long, unless it has very few elements. Instead I’d learn a more robust video editor like DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro.

The monthly Pro subscription currently costs $19.99. Overall, this is reasonable for the value. Pro unlocks many extra features that are useful, or at least interesting to experiment with.

For putting together a couple simple videos, it isn’t worth it, but for any sort of consistent use or complex editing, I’d get Pro.

What happens if you get it, make projects, and then cancel your subscription? Your videos will still be in your account. But anything you made using a Pro-level feature can’t be downloaded again until you resubscribe.