How to Edit Videos for YouTube on CapCut

In this video, we're going to learn how to edit  a YouTube video, even if you have no experience. I'm going to start with the really basic stuff.  So even if you've never opened an editing app of any kind, you've never worked with editing video  in your entire life, you'll be able to take what you learn and actually make something.

I'm going  to give you all the tools to do it. Let's jump in. Okay, so we're going to start with some very  basic concepts.

When you're making a video edit, what you're really doing is you're creating a  story out of videos. Every edit is a story. And so just like you would write a story, like write  a sentence, this is kind of a similar way to how we would build a story in a video editing app.

So,  we have a sample story here, and it's a sentence that's made out of a few different parts. The  dog walked itself home, ate a pizza, and took a nap. This is one of my favorite movie quotes.

If  you know this quote, let me know in the comments, but it's a great place to start with when we talk  about actually building a story. So, the story as it is right now is the dog walked itself home, ate  a pizza, and took a nap. But if we were writing this story, we would have the freedom to kind of  change things a little bit.

For instance, we could take the rest of this away, and we could just have  a story of the dog walked itself home. We could say the dog walked itself home and ate a pizza.  And so we could trim off the end part of this story if we wanted to, but we could even cut out  parts in the middle.

The dog didn't walk itself home, it just ate a pizza and took a nap. And  by moving these little parts and pieces around, or even getting rid of things, we change the story  as the reader reads it. Editing videos works in a very similar way.

Just like we have little pieces  of our sentence here, what we can do is craft a story in our video editing app with pieces  of video. And those pieces are called clips. Anytime you shoot something with your camera, it  starts recording when you hit the record button, and it stops when you hit the stop button. 

And everything that it records, you can call this a video clip. So, it's just one file that  can be one second, 10 seconds, two hours long, and it's the recording that the camera makes. And  there's really kind of two parts to editing once we have a bunch of video clips.

One of them is  that we can trim our video clip to not be as long, either cutting off the beginning or cutting off  the end and just keeping the useful part. So, for instance, the video that we recorded might be  somebody talking, but for the first five seconds, they're getting ready to talk. They're figuring  out what they want to say.

And then they say the actual useful part. And then at the end, they  sneeze. We can cut out the sneeze and cut out the getting ready.

And we can just grab the useful  part from this video clip. And so, we're cutting off the beginning and cutting off the end. That's  something that we call setting an in and an out.

The in point is where the useful part starts,  and the out point is where it ends. And so, what we have is a trimmed down version of our  video clip. So that's one way that we can edit.

The other way we edit is by putting clips together  in a timeline. A timeline is a piece of the video editor where we assemble our story. And so, we  can take all of the little pieces that we shot and put them in order.

And it's kind of like we're  building a sentence. Just like if we were writing a story, we can take out and remove and reorder  things, make the dog walk itself home, took a nap and ate a pizza. We can do the same kind of thing  with video clips here in the timeline.

We can move them around. We can make them shorter or longer. And we can arrange these to be our story, but we arrange these clips in time.

And  that creates the layout of our video. So, the clips at the left get played first and then  it plays each clip in succession. So let's make this just a little more practical.

Let's say we  have our dog, Wiggles. Let's say we record clips of Wiggles on our camera and we record a whole  bunch of different events and actions and things that he's doing. We'll have a close up of the  dog's face, the dog walking through a doggy door, the dog sleeping on the couch, the dog walking  down the street until he reaches the house, the dog eating a pizza, the dog peeing on a tree, and  the dog drinking water.

These are a whole bunch of kind of unrelated actions that we can shoot with  Wiggles. But what's really neat is we can take these clips into a video editor and we can arrange  them on the timeline into a story. Here's kind of how that works.

I can take all these clips and the  first thing that I need to do is actually bring them into my video editing program so that that  app can grab them and do stuff with them. And so, we're going to drag them into our editing app.  And now the app knows that they exist.

Now this isn't copying the files to a different place on  your computer. It's just basically pointing the app to the files and telling them where they are  and that it's okay for it to open them up and play them back and let us edit with them. Now that we  have the clips in the app, we don't have a video yet.

All we've done is kind of gathered the pieces  for our video, all the different clips that don't really relate to each other, but we have all  the pieces to our story. Then we can put clips into the timeline to actually make our story. And  what's amazing is we have so much freedom here, especially if you have a lot of different pieces,  you can move them around and put them in order to make a variety of different kinds of stories.

So,  if we were going to make our story, the dog walked itself home, ate a pizza and took a nap. How would  we make that? Well, we do have a clip of the dog walking down the street until he reaches a house. 

Okay, so let's grab that. And that's going to be our first clip. That's the very first thing that  happens.

So, we're dragging it to the timeline and all the way to the left. It kind of reads from  left to right. And so, our video starts here.

The dog walks down the street until he reaches the  house. Cool. Then what happens?

Well, he needs to go into the house, right? So, let's have the dog  walking through the doggy door. All right.

And then what happens? He ate a pizza. So, here's the  dog eating a pizza.

Let's put that there. And then he took a nap. So, the dog sleeping on the couch.

Okay, so now we have the story made from our video clips of the dog walking itself home. So, he's  walking down the street until he reaches the house. The dog walking through the doggy door, the  dog eating a pizza, the dog sleeping on the couch.

So, the dog walked itself home, ate a pizza  and took a nap. Pretty cool. But just like we were writing a story, we can adjust these in the  exact same way.

The dog walked down the street until he reaches the house. We could make this  move a little bit faster. We could just have him walking down the street.

We'll trim this clip to  be a little bit shorter, so it's just him walking down the street and then walking through the doggy  door. And we can assume that that's his house. The dog eats a pizza and the dog takes it out  sleeping on the couch.

Maybe we don't want to show him eating a pizza. We can take this  out. And now the dog walks down the street, walks through the doggy door, sleeps on  the couch.

And with our different pieces, we can completely change our story, right? We  could say the dog starts by drinking water. Then he walks down the  street and he pees on a tree.

We could even make this interesting and  say we could duplicate him drinking water. And duplicate him peeing on a tree. And what's  our story now?

The dog drinks water, walks down the street, pees on a tree, drinks water, pees  on a tree. And we could just have him doing that over and over again. The point is that it doesn't  really matter what the real story was.

We have complete freedom through the power of editing to  create our own story with all these little pieces. So that's kind of the big concept. Let's take  a look at how to actually do this.

I'm going to show you a great app for beginners called CapCut.  CapCut is a free video editor. It's available for Mac and Windows.

And there's also versions for  your phone and your tablet. You can do all kinds of cool stuff in CapCut. If you're just getting  started out, this is such a good app to start with.

They even have an online video editor, so  you don't even have to download and install the app. They have all kinds of fancy things. You can  remove backgrounds.

You can do color correction. You can make captions when people are talking.  There's all kinds of resources like music and graphics and effects and everything you can add  to it.

And they have a very, very powerful, very capable free version. There's also a paid version  that has a little bit more features, but you can do everything that I'm going to show you here and  really make just about any kind of video you want with the free version of CapCut. So, let's open  up the interface here.

This is CapCut. And if it looks kind of intimidating, don't worry. You don't  need to know what every single little button and slider and everything does.

All you need to know  is pretty much what we already went over with our little example. Even though there are a lot of  little buttons and things like that, we're just going to focus on two areas of the app today.  The first one is this upper left area.

This is where we put all of the video clips that we might  want to use. This is where we throw all of our pieces. It's this part, taking all of the clips  from our camera and bringing them into the app.

Okay. And so, we need some video to play around  with here. We have some sample media available featuring our good friend, Kevin, who is baking  some cookies.

And you can download this media for free and follow along with me in CapCut. All you  have to do is click the link in the description. We'll also leave a link right up there.

So, if you  want to follow along, you can pause this video, go and download those clips, and you can try this  out yourself. When you do have that downloaded, it's going to give you a zip file. All you have  to do is right click on the zip file and select extract all and then hit extract.

And that's  going to put all of the files into a folder right next to this zip folder. Double click on  that and you'll have all the clips that I have here in this video. And you can take those clips  and drag them over into our media panel right here and let go.

And that will bring up all  the clips here in CapCut. So, all we've done is told CapCut where the videos are that we want  to use on our system. So, it's not copying them, it's not duplicating them or anything like that. 

All it's doing is picking out the clips that are on our hard drive and it's grabbing them and it's  ready for us to use them. And from here, we can start to make our story in the timeline, which  is down here. So, if you're following along, do me a favor and grab this first clip.

All you have  to do is just grab it like this and drag it down into the timeline. It'll make a nice little gray  welcoming box here and let go of it. That's going to put that clip in the timeline and that's  going to be the first thing that somebody who watches our movie is going to see.

And so, if I  hit spacebar, there we go. We're playing it back. This little white line that moves back and forth,  this is called the play head.

So, this is the time that we're looking at right now. Just like there's  a play head down there in the YouTube player, you can grab this and move it back and forth to  scrub through your video, find the parts you like, and just navigate your timeline that way. And so  this is our first clip.

It's the first part of our story. Kevin takes the cookies out of the oven.  Now, if we want to, we can click on any of these clips and we can play it back.

And so it's just  going to play it back right here in this window. It doesn't mean that it's added to our story.  It's just kind of previewing it for us so that we can see what the clip is on this big screen  rather than just in this little thumbnail.

And so, we have them pouring milk. We have a different  clip of pouring milk. We have cookies dropping into the milk.

We have the cookies on the counter.  We have stacks of cookies. There is a variety of different things that we could do right here. 

So, he takes the cookies out. Let's say he pours a glass of milk. We'll take this milk  down here and you'll see when I drop it, it kind of pushes it all the way to the left.

That's  so that we don't have a gap in between these two clips. There we go. Now we have that milk pouring  and that clip is really, really long.

And so just like in our example, where we could cut off the  end of a clip, dog walking down the street until he reaches the house, we'll just get rid of until  he reaches the house and trim that shorter. We can trim our clips shorter. I'm going to go over here  to this little bar right here that has a couple of magnifying glasses and I'm going to hit the minus  a couple times and that's going to zoom out so that we can see our whole clip.

And this is pretty  long. If we look on the ruler here, this starts at six seconds and goes all the way to 26 seconds.  So, this is a 20 second long clip here.

So, we play this back. Yeah, it's pretty long. So, if we want this to be shorter, we can just grab the edge of this and you see how my  cursor kind of turns into a different icon, turns into this little line with the arrows.

If  it shows me those lines and the arrows, I can grab the edge of this and I can move this over and  it's going to make my clip shorter. And it's just going to cut off the last part of the clip like  that. So now we only have this from six seconds to about 16 seconds.

So, we cut this in half, but  let's say we actually don't want the first half of this. We want the second half where we're kind  of finishing the milk like this. We can do the same thing for the beginning of the clip.

I can  grab this just like this and drag it to the right and trim it like here. And it's going to show me  the very first moment of this clip. And so, let's just start it right there.

Everything's going to  snap back over to the left. And now we have this 10 seconds, but it's the last half of the clip.  So, we have him pouring milk.

Oh, it's beautiful. And that's great. And so, the story so far is  Kevin grabs the cookies out of the oven, pours a glass of milk.

And then what happens? I think  it's probably time he eats a cookie, right? So, here's a clip of him eating a cookie.

Wonderful. Let's grab that and put that down here at the end. So, he pours a glass of milk and then eats  the cookie.

Beautiful. But let's say that we want to add something in between these shots.  So, we have the milk and we have him eating the cookie.

What if we want to show the cookie  going into the milk? That would be good, right? Well, we have a clip of that.

We have a clip of  cookies being dropped into the milk. And so let's take this clip and I'm just going to grab it and  drag it from our media down into our timeline. But depending on where I drag it, it's going  to do some different things.

I can, of course, drag it to the end like this. I can even drag it  on top. And what that's going to do is make a new layer.

And just like if you had a piece of paper  and you were to put another piece of paper over it, you would only see the top piece of paper.  The same thing happens in the timeline. We have our two clips here, but we're only going to see  the clip that's over them when we play this back.

And so that's a way that we can just put something  over something else. But also when we're dragging this around, we can drag this in between two  clips and look, it kind of moves the clips out of the way and gives us this gray rectangle  in between the clips. If we let go there, that's going to just put that perfectly in  between the clips, which is just so fantastic, right?

Makes it really easy to adjust the order  of things. But you do have to pay attention where it wants to drop that clip. Because if you're  wanting to put this in between, but it's kind of highlighting the top, it's going to put it on top.

Another thing is if I drag a clip from our media panel down here, that'll give me those options,  but I can also drag it right on top of a clip like this. And when it kind of grays out the clip, it's  going to replace it. And it's going to ask me how I want to replace it, what part I want to use. 

And you can say replace. And so that's nice if you want to replace a clip, but it can be kind  of frustrating if you don't want to. The great news is just like in most apps on the computer,  there is an undo button.

So, if you do something you don't like, you could do one of two things.  Let me hide my camera for just a second because there's a button right here. That's the undo  button.

And so I can hit that. And that will undo what I just did. You'll also notice when you  go over this button, it says undo control plus Z.

That's a shortcut. After you get used to the  concepts of editing video, you should really think about learning some shortcuts because  they're exactly that. It's a shortcut.

It's going to make things go faster. It's going  to let you edit more videos in less time, work efficiently. And the shortcut for undo in  CapCut, as well as a lot of different programs is control Z or command Z if you're on the  Mac.

And so, if I do something crazy, like replace this clip, I can just hit control Z on my  keyboard and that's going to undo that right away. And now I'm back to the shot of Kevin  eating a cookie. And that's after my milk, which I don't want to do that.

Let's just take  this and rearrange it. We have pouring the milk, putting the cookies in the milk and then  eating the cookie. And there are all kinds of things that you can do with this footage. 

You can make your own story. This footage is perfect to practice on and to mess around with  things in the timeline and start opening up CapCut and getting your hands dirty. The great  thing about this is that you'll never mess up your footage and delete it off your hard drive  or permanently ruin it or anything like that.

It's totally safe to play around with things  in CapCut. No matter how bad of a job you do, your footage is always going to be safe. And  so, you can mess around and make all kinds of stories here in the timeline without any risk. 

And this is really only the very beginning of what CapCut can do. For instance, you can put any  kind of media here in the media pool, things like audio that you've recorded or music or still  pictures, and you can add all of those things to the timeline to make your YouTube videos. So,  if I want to add some music, I can just grab this MP3 that I brought in and drag this down into the  timeline.

And that's going to make an audio track. An audio track works exactly like a video  track. It's just audio only.

And so, you can trim things and move them around and  add music to your movie. Let's just zoom out and trim this music to end right there when our  video ends like that. And now we have music.

And so, we're really starting to put together a  video. There are so many more things that you can do in CapCut that are so exciting. But if you're  just starting out, this is plenty for right now.

The one other thing I'll do is show you how to  export the video so you can actually upload this to YouTube. All you have to do is go up to the  upper right hand corner of our interface. There's this teal button where it says export, click on  that, and then you'll have a window with a lot of different options.

Don't even worry about the  options right now. Whatever it comes up with is just fine for now. The one thing you'll want to  do is give it a title.

So, we'll just call this cookies. And where it says export to, click  on this little folder and pick where you want it to go. I'll just select my desktop for now and  then hit export.

What this is going to do is it's going to think about your video and it's going  to convert it into an actual video that can be uploaded to YouTube. If you don't export it like  this, what CapCut does is it just keeps kind of the instructions for how to make a video in what's  called a project file. So that's a file that you can only open in CapCut, but you have to export  it and actually convert it into a new video clip, like its own video clip, so that you can  put it onto YouTube.

So once that's done, you could select YouTube and you could sign into  your account, give it a title and description, a playlist in a category and hit share. And  that'll upload to YouTube for you. Or you could just go down to open folder and here  it'll make two files for you.

One is just an audio file. The other one is a video file with  the audio in it. So, if I double click on this, that'll open up in my video player and we can  actually look at the video that we edited.

And this is the actual file that you would  upload to YouTube. And so on YouTube, you can go up to the upper right. If you don't  have an account, you'll need to make one and click on this create button and say upload video.

And  this is where you'll actually upload that video that you just made in CapCut. So, we just got to  find it. Here we are.

Here's my cookies video. I can grab this and just drag it and it's going to  start that upload. And then it's going to ask me to put in the title and description and everything  that you need to actually make the YouTube video available on YouTube.

But that's the basics of the  process of making a YouTube video in CapCut. So, if you're brand new to video editing, don't  be afraid. I know you can do this.

Go ahead and download those video clips right here  for free. Install the desktop version of CapCut and get going. If we've never met, my  name's Casey and I teach all kinds of video editing things.

And if you want more of that,  make sure to let me know in the comments and we'll put up more videos on CapCut for  newbies. Hope you have an awesome day.