CapCut Advanced Masterclass: Cinematic Editing, Effects & Pro Workflows

1. Welcome to the CapCut Advanced Masterclass!: Welcome to the CapCut expert course. If you have reached this point, you already know how to edit. Now is the time to make your videos more intentional, cinematic, and professional. In the class, we're going to go beyond basic editing and beyond faster workflows. I'm HosteKihi a freelance creative professional and online instructor. Have taught over 200,000 students across more than 15 courses. Through the courses, I help students learn more weights that they could express through creativity and learn practical skills that they could apply to their digital contents. In my own work, I focus more on content that is polished, intentional, and engaging. And that's exactly the things that we're going to focus on in this class. We're going to start with some advanced techniques such as working with multi tracks, managing your timeline with markers, managing layers, and using keyframes to create more smooth motion. We're going to move on to more visual effects and compositing. We're going to look at green screens, thumb color grading, overlays, and many more things. You're also going to learn how to blend audios, shortcuts to speed up your workflows, and how to create thumbnails that will actually attract clicks. The core of this class is a cinematic project. For the project, you're going to be creating a short, scary clip. We're going to do it all from scratch, from start to finish. We're going to go over mood, visual design, sound design, and overlays. Effects are going to continue onto the mobile version of CapCut, where we're going to learn more shortcuts, more visual effects, beat syncing, and many more things that you can achieve from your mobile. By the end of the class, you're going to be shaping how all of your videos feel. But without further ado, let's get started. 2. Advanced Timeline Workflow: When your projects get bigger, you're going to be dealing with a lot of layers. And it's very important how you maneuver that and how you go about dealing with multi layer editing. So in this lesson, we're going to create a more complex project. I'll just be dragging media in from the Capcot library. And that way, we can see how we could begin organizing those layers. What are some of the ways that we could work on one while keeping the others as they are? And I'm just going to import a bunch of videos from here. So it doesn't really matter because it's more about the layers that we're going to work with. So I'll just go to scenery for this lesson, and I'll go for maybe this out and try to layer a bunch of things on top of each other. And as you can see, some of the clips are long, some of them are short, and this is the, you know, perfect situation. Not going to be dealing with audio in this lesson. That's going to be a few lessons forward. But for now, just think any sort of video layers. Let me just zoom in here. Okay, so when you first drag everything all at once, it's most likely the case that they're going to be snapped to the side like this. Before you bring in your clips, it's a good idea to make sure that's the correct one. So in our case, you could just use the star to favorite something. Let's say you just plugged in your SD card and there's like 100 videos. Instead of importing all of them, bringing them into the timeline, you can watch through each one. So just dapple click on it, and it's going to be previewed here. And then if this is the correct video or if it's something that you want to keep, you just hit the star button. So you can see that this clip is not in our selection. So just by Dapple clicking, we're only previewing. Once you have those selected videos in, like these that I have down below, you can start moving them around. So with layers, you can think of it as though you have a bunch of books and you're looking at them from the above. So the top video, top layer is going to be what's going to show up on the playback. So you can see that when the first video ends, we jump to what's right below. So these two ended early, but this guy is visible, so we're going to see this clip and then the last clip. So that's just a review of how layers work in case you weren't familiar, and we're just now going to move them around in the order that we want him to show up. So let's say I want the first video to be of the clouds and then I want this leak to show up and let's do this guy. And I'll put this in the end and this guy in between. So this right here is fine, but it's not that organized. And when it multiplies, let's say you have 50 videos in one project, it's going to get very hectic. So try to build a staircase in your timeline, and you can easily do that by changing the order of your videos. So we can see that the second video that shows up is actually this guy, but this clip is currently on layer two. So all we're going to do is click on this guy and drag it down. So you can see a blue line appears right above the clouds. Once I let go, we just change the position, the order. And I could do the same thing with this video. Just got to find the middle line. There we go. So now we're building that staircase. And let's say this is the last clip. So now that everything is ordered, this is going to be a lot more helpful for you, especially if you want to do transitions. You know that you need to find a transition that's suitable going from this scenery to this scenery, and then just go about doing the rest. Same way. Now, we already know how to trim and cut clips, so I'm just going to speed through that and just do that. So now I have a full staircase. Now, if you want to blend two videos together, you could have them placed like this. So both of them are overlapping. And while the top video is playing, we still have the bottom one underneath. Think, Okay, I'm just going to move this to the side so that they're perfectly aligned, and then bring this in a little bit. Okay. So just go on the top one. This is just an example of layer application. So just go over to blend, hit the triangle to open it up, and you could try one of these blend modes. So let's say multiply. It's going to darken the two clips together and have them overlap like this. So you can see this guy just shows up and it maybe intensifies the video if that's something you want to do. Obviously, we have a lot more that we could do on the side for video, so feel free to experiment and go about doing that. Let's say you have the perfect sequence, but you change your mind about this clip. Instead of reimporting something and then dragging it down, trimming it, you can just replace that clip. So right click on the video that you want to replace. Then go to more clip actions and hit Replace. So when you do that, the window is going to pop up for you to import something. And I'm just going to bring in something from my downloads, and then you can see that it's going to be right in that same placeholder. So I just brought in this image just example. You can hit Replace clip, and you can see that it just flipped it out and put in this image. I did not have to trim anything, move it around. It just completely changed the content, but kept the placement. That's how you can keep your timeline organized without having to start over. We already know how to use the top bars. You can use them for snapping features. So that's generally how you can work with multi tracks when it comes to video. We're going to take a look at blending audios later. But you can blend clips like we did here with the image, the lake. You just drag them in between two clips. In our case, we don't have two clips right next to each other, so we're going to have to utilize animations. And that's going to be the topic for our next lesson. So I'm just going to keep the timeline that we have here, and we're just going to build it on in this chapter. 3. Keyframe Animations: Keyframes allow you to animate between adjustments when it comes to clips and audio. This is the sequence that we made in the previous lesson, and I'm going to focus on this longer one so we can see how we could apply multiple keyframes and make various adjustments. So just place your playhead at the moment where you want something changed. And then when you come to video on the right panel, you can see these diamond shaped symbols that are just keyframes. If you don't see it being blue, that means that there's currently no keyframes at that moment. This is the moment that we are paused on, so 8 seconds in. And say I want to maybe have a sequence where we zoom in for a few seconds, then we zoom out. If I wanted to do this the traditional way, I would have to cut my clip and then use a transition. But now we're just going to do it with keyframes. So go to scale, which is the zoom in and zoom out property. Click on the diamond shape, and you can see that we got ourself a diamond on the clip. Then moving forward, make another one. Can see when there is a keyframe at that moment, the diamond is colored, and then one last one over here. So basically, we're going to be neutral at this point. Zoom in here and then zoom out. So all we got to do is go to the second keyframe, which you could just scroll past it like this or click on the arrow right here. So it goes to the next keyframe. Because if you're a little off, you're going to end up creating another one when you make a change. So let's click on next keyframe. And once this is full, it means that I'm currently editing a keyframe. I'm just going to grab the scale slider and Zoom. And then when we go from the start, you can see that here it's normal, zooms in and zooms out to the original video. So think of this as different points, and whatever's happening in between is the keyframe animation. So this is a very simple example. Now, you could delete your keyframes by right clicking and clicking on Delete or just click on Backspace on your keyboard, just like that. And you can apply keyframes for various things. So you can see that they're next to scale, position, rotation, even blending and everything else that comes after. So if you see this symbol, that means that you're able to create a keyframe for it. So that was for scale. Let's open up the other properties and try something else. So once again, I'm going to make a scale keyframe. So let's make one like this. If you want something to go back to the original, it's a good idea to make the two keyframes before and after without changing anything and then make that transition in between. So let's scale right in. And say at this moment, I want my video to rotate a little bit, and that's where I get to mix and combine various key frames together. So what we just did is regarding scale alone. But right at this moment on this keyframe, it's going to move it towards the center. I'm going to grab rotation, make a keyframe right above. So you're not going to see it here. You can see that it's only one keyframe. But if you see these two color, that means there is one. Then I'll go back to the first scale keyframe, make another rotation one, and then at the end. So right over here. So when we go to the middle, I'm just going to highlight it so that I'm changing that keyframe. And now I get to, you know, add a few angles. Let's say, six degrees, and then we have that transition happening. So it's going in, then going out. We could add other properties as well, such as position. So currently, the X and Y axis is set to the origin. I could make one, change after we finish this animation. So if you don't do a before and after, and say you make one keyframe and make your change, that's going to be applied to the whole video. So if I do 50 plus X, the whole clip is going to have that, 50 plus X effect. So it's really important to have a before and after if you want things to transition over time. Let's delete that guy, and I'm going to turn this to zero. That was position. Let's try one for blending. I'll make a keyframe here. We actually need a video from above. So I'm just going to drag the camel video and then make a keyframe right here. So blend, we're going to put three keyframes, just like we did for scale and rotation. Let's say for the middle keyframe, I'm going to lower the opacity. And if I get rid of the first keyframe, it's going to be we can do a transition. So the first keyframe, I'm going to set it to zero opacity, delete that guy. So we have zero opacity going to 100. So we have this fade in effect without having to use the transitions that are there. All right. There's a bunch of other things, for example, with speed, if you want to do something, you're able to. Let me just delete these keyframes for now and start over. So let's go for a clip that has a little bit of movement. I'm going to bring the opacity up. So we have these camels and people walking by, but I could use speed keyframes to manipulate the speed at each second. So highlight the video, go to speed, a custom, and we have that same keyframe logic over here. So there's a plus button and you get to move it around. When it comes to speed, there's a whole different layout. The middle line on this graph refers to the original speed. Anything that goes up is sped up, and anything that goes below is slowed down. So let's say at this moment, I want everything to slow down, I'll just click on plus, and we have our keyframe, and then I'll come back, say here and let everything stay normal. So I want things to slow down, so I'm just going to grab this edge and then the other edge, then maybe let's make a keyframe here. Here, I'll make everything like sped up a little. And the smoother your curves are, the better the transition. You can use the minus here to delete a keyframe, and now I have a much smoother curve. Do something like that. Okay, so we have the video playing at normal speed. It slows down at this curve, then speeds up and then goes back to normal. And if we preview that, it's going to look like this. So you can see how it performed that curve. You can kind of imagine the speed curve as a roller coaster. If you guys were here, you know, you would dive down, slowly make your way up before diving down again. So if I make something very steep like this, it's going to drop to slow a lot faster. Just like that. Once you're done, you could, you know, click away. If you want to remove these curves, you can just click on none, and now it's set back to one time, which is the original speed. Now, the same thing can be applied to audio, the whole keyframe logic. So I'm just going to grab a random audio, drag it in. And you can see that we have the same things except we're in the audio tab. So for audio, you can manipulate volume, fade in and fade out. And what that means is that at this point, I'm going to make a keyframe. I could set it to whatever decibel it's on right now. And then around here, I'm just gonna make another one and make it much lower. And then around here, I could bring it back to what we had. There's like a dip right now in the sound waves, and that's what we did with the key frames. Mm. So this is important for times where you have multiple layered audio. Let's say you have the background music, the SFX, and a dialogue. You would want to play around with these so that you could set the mood and still have you be able to hear the dialogue and enjoy the music in the background. And that's going to be the focus of the next lesson where we learn how to use keyframes and blending audios. 4. Blending Audio with Sound Effects: Now, let's apply that keyframe mentality to audio. So just like we did with the different sequences, we're going to bring in a bunch of audios, and I'm going to be focusing on dialogue, background music and sound effects. So right now we don't really have a track for audio. So to make one, you just simply drag in one from the audio panel. So let's just grab the first one, drag it right below, and we can put in a few other things. So let's try to find sound effects in the other library. And I'm going to match it to our video. So let's say here we want the sound of birds. So I'm just going to look for birds, and we can listen to a few and see which one is the best. So that's pretty good. I'm going to drag it right underneath. The second thing is gonna take remove this picture. So we have four clips for this guy. I'm not sure if we need any audio or this we could do like wind and trees maybe to have wind trees. So this is okay. I'm gonna drag that underneath and just build up as I go. And for here, I think I'll do an owl sound effect just 'cause it's nighttime. So let's search owl. Mmm. Mm. Mmm. Okay. I'll drag this guy, and I'm sort of matching them with the clips. Just drag them like that. I'll offset this a little bit. And for the last guy, I'm not sure if camels, we can find something for that here. So those are camel sounds. I'm surprised they have it here. Let's just track that right underneath. Alright, so now, same as the previous lesson, we have a bunch of audios. And for the dialogue, I'm going to use the AI tool within Capcut. If you search for text to speech Capcut, you're going to get this free interface, and I'm just going to paste my poem right over here. So generate AI voice, and we could listen to a few of these sounds and see which one works the best. Let me try one of the categories. Okay? So these are just languages. I'll click on the filters and maybe get someone that's elderly. Only two. So I'll just create it with the poetic male voice, which probably works fine for us. So hit generate, and then you can download it, put it into maybe who kit it with the captions. Then you can put it into our project. There we go. I'm just going to give this a listen. The time is right when you feel the winds speeding up. So it's like a low deep voice, which works perfectly with the nature scenes that we have. So position the dialogue where you want it to be, and we could start putting all this together. So you could use markers to identify where you want the sound to be, or you could just do it with your playhead directly. It's really up to you. I know that each of the lines in the poem is one of these sound waves. So the first sentence it's from here till here. Oops. Let's mute the other guys. Right. When you feel the winds speeding up. So that's the first line I'm going to make my cut. When the night sky makes you feel at home, the forest speaks with all its might. And there's the fourth one. So I have four lines because I have four clips, and I obviously want this to be a lot slower. So we have some dialogue, some music, and then we can blend it as we go. So let's unmute all the audio, and I'm going to scroll down so I only see that. Now, instead of just going up and down like this, I could set markers on my timeline. So let's say the video ends here, I'm going to click on Marker. What was that? No, no, no, no. That words marker. No. So I'm just going to put all my markers on something that's constant, like the background music, and then I'll just have that selected. Go to the end of each video and click on at Marker. You could use the keyboard, key on your keyboard, and then you're going to get these little marks that will, you know, prevent you from scrolling up and down. So this is where the other video ends. M again, last video. Well, there's two more. Let's actually move this a little bit to the right and then click on. I have four markers on my main audio. Now we just work around over here. So I know the first one is bird sounds. So let's focus on these two. And I'll just bring the other sound effects and match them with the video that, you know, it's for. So this guy, I wanted to be in between this area, drag it to the right and we don't need the extra bits. Maybe two hoots it's enough because it's an owl. This is wind blowing. Let's put it here. Use the trim tool to get rid of the extras. And this guy, I think is the camel. So I'll take a little bit more from this because in the middle, it sounds a little odd. Okay. So the lower sounds are accurate, but I'm not sure what this is for the middle section. But anyway, I'm now gonna put in each of these sentences together, each of the sentence where it should be. So this is the first one. Put it right at the start, the second right over here, third, and fourth. So we're adding some space, and I'm going to see how long my clips should be. The time is right. So this video is too short. I'm gonna drag it like this and play around with the placement of the clips a little bit. Force. So the placement of the dialogue is good. Now we just got to play around with the volume because we can't really hear what the person is saying over the background music. So what you could do is use keyframes here or just turn it down completely. This is up to you. But I'm going to do the keyframe method just so you guys can see how you can apply it to audio and video. Right over here, zoom in here. You can use the bar up here as well. I'm going to make a keyframe when the dialogue ends, clicking on the main music, which is the last one. I'm going to click on a keyframe for volume and then do another one a bit after. So basically, from the start till this point, let me just extend this. We're going to lower the audio a little bit. The time is then you can see the audio just goes up. Yeah. We're going to do the same thing right before he starts to speak. We're gonna add a keyframe and another one before so that the transition is smooth and, like, it doesn't suddenly drop. Then I'll do one after he finishes this sentence. So something let's click on it. So now we have something like this. Night Sky. I just muted all the other tracks, except the background music and the dialogue. Let's see what happened here. I'm just gonna try to match the other side here. The time is right when you feel the wind speed up. When the night sky makes you feel at home, And we're just going to continue this for the entire poem. One thing that we do have to do is smooth out the key framing a little bit, so it doesn't suddenly rise up or down. Just repeating the process here. So let's try to match the decibels, as well. I could do 6 decibels, negative six. There we go. Next one, type in negative six. Okay. So this one's fine. It should be at zero. This one, we could do negative six. The other one should be negative six, as well. The night sky makes you feel it, huh? Okay. So let's just continue for the last sentence. So let's make one here, one at the end, and then one on each side. Negative six. Negative six. And then the rest is just the music. Alright, so now we have to work with adding more space between the two key frames so that it's not, you know, a very quick transition. Give this a listen first. And you're no longer in the twilight. Mm. Okay, so this guy is fine, but this guy needs to be stretched out. Just click and drag until you have a similar curve to the other one. If you hold down shift, you're able to, you know, make the changes that you were making up here. For example, this guy is way too steep, and this guy is obviously very steep. Okay, so let's increase the volume for all of the dialogue. Time is right. When you feel the winds speeding up. The nights. So, the original one is too low, so I'm just gonna go for 5.5. And let's cut the rest of the audio here, trim that, trim that. And similarly, you could just change the volume for these guys depending on your preference. So these guys will vary loud. The time is right when you feel the winds When the night sky makes you feel at home Oops. Gonna cut deep birds. We're gonna learn more about blending audios in our project lesson, so this is just an introduction. The time is. But over there, we're gonna create a scary short film, a scary clip, actually. So we're able to look at the mood on the screen and better connect the different sound effects. Right. When you feel the winds speak When the night sky makes you feel at home. The forest speaks with all its might. So I'm just going to fade this out a little bit. And the middle section for the camel audio is still a little odd. So I'll just utilize key frames again to kind of dip it in the middle and then bring it back to the original. So click on that, hold down shift, and just bring it down. Let's do 8.1. Or maybe lower. I'll do negative 12. And you're no longer in the twilight zone. And there we go. So that was a quick demonstration of blending audios and using key frames from the first lesson that we looked at. In the next lesson, we're going to be looking at some keyboard shortcuts, and those come really in handy if you plan to do this in a more professional way or if you're just running short on time. 5. Essential CapCut Shortcuts: Shortcuts are always a good way to save on time and work around your project more efficiently. So in Capcut, you can access the list of shortcuts from the Help menu. So just click on that, go to shortcut, and you can see all the different things that you can press on your keyboard to make something happen. Now, there's obviously a lot that you can see, but the good thing is that you can kind of have different sets of shortcuts. And if you don't like something, you can change it out. So let's say I want to add a shortcut for reverse, I'm going to click on that empty box and say I want to do Option Command K. And then click away. So now I have made a shortcut for myself. And if I don't like a shortcut, I could just, you know, click on it and do the same thing. So let's say instead of the left arochy, I want to do Shift left, and I'm going to get an error because that already exists. So let's do Shift Command left aroch. That is unique. And then you can revert it back by just clicking something on it again. If you click on Reset, that's going to give you the system default. But there's different things that you could do. So this is regarding everything in the timeline. This is for the player right here where you see your videos. Basic are the universal word cut, such as copy paste cut. And we also have some additional things here. G to click on Cancel. And I'll just show you some that could be helpful at this moment. So one of them is something we looked at in the previous lesson, and that's adding markers. So just by clicking M on your keyboard, you're able to make markers on the timeline if you're not selecting a clip and on the clip if you are clicking it first. So M, just to add some markers. The next thing is trimming your clips. So instead of clicking this, you can select the clip and do Command or Control B. And that's going to split it for you in a very fast manner. If you want to trim the left side, you just hit Q, and it just gets rid of the left side, and you can undo with one of the universal shortcuts, Commander Control Z. If you want to get rid of the right, you hit W, and now the right side is gone. It's dependent on where you have your playhead. You can undo with Command or Control Z, but you can redo. So let's do Commander Control Z. You can redo, which is to bring something. Doing Command Control Shift Z. So it went back to the trimming that we had. If you click on Command Shift B, that can allow you to trim multiple clips at a time. So let's just drag them all together, and I'll click away. So Command Shift B, you can see that I split it three clips at the same time. Another way to do this is by clicking and dragging all three with a playhead at where you want to cut, you just do Commander Control B. So it's the same thing, but different ways. If you want to duplicate something, you can click and hold Alter option on your keyboard, and that's going to make a duplicate. Can do Command or Control C to copy Command or Control V to paste, Command or Control X to cut, and then use paste to bring it back. So those were some very quick shortcuts that you can look at. Again, if you want to learn more, see what's currently available on your system. Each computer will have a different set of keyframes, especially if you've already modified it. But if you click on Reset, and if you're on Mac, this is what you're going to see. So you can take a look and see which action you do often and then see the shortcut for. Now that we know some more advanced techniques regarding blending, key framing, and shortcuts, we can now move on to different types of visual effects, and that's going to be the center point for our next chapter. 6. Video Effects & Overlays: An overlay is when you combine a top image or video onto the one below using either opacity or blend modes. And that's going to be the focus of today's lesson because you can use overlays to enhance a mood, add additional textures or add different elements without having to bring them in separately. So let's start by bringing in a random clip as our base video. I'm going to go to media library, and we can just pick something like going to go for life, maybe something that's a little brighter. Okay. So this guy, I'm going to drag it in, and it's gonna download the material first. So when you think of overlays, it could actually be any clip, so I could grab a second one from here and then blend it into my bottom video, and that's technically an overlay. But it's not going to be that good unless I have a plan in mind. So let's say this is my base video, and at the same time, I want this plane video to play right above. I don't blend the top video onto the bottom, it's just going to show me what the top video is. So with the top one selected, all I have to do is go to video Basic, open up the blend menu and use one of the blend modes. So I could try multiply to darken it. I could do overlay, just going to kind of blend them in like this. You can see that it's mostly keeping the contrasted elements. And there's a bunch more other blend modes. It really depends on what you're trying to do. Color Dodge, linear burn, and hard light, these are the ones that brighten and blend. Multiply color burn and overlay are the ones that darken to blend. So that's the main difference, and these are the ones where they sit in the middle. And then the ones below are just going to completely brighten up to brighten up the top clip to the point that you can't really see the outlines of our plane. Darken it. On the other end, we have soft light, and we have screen. So again, try each one, see what you're trying to do. If you're trying to darken, you can go for those. If you're trying to brighten, go for the ones above. So this right here is a very simple example of an overlay where the top video is an overlay for the bottom clip. But if you want something more natural, you would want to grab a video that's made for overlay purposes because this plane clip is just a video of an airplane. But if I type in the search bar for overlay, I'm going to get a few things that are just those elements. So this guy, I believe is in. And if I place it above my video, it's just a black background with some white elements coming in at an angle. So if I scale this up so that it fits the screen, go to my blend mode and click on screen, we can see that I'm only getting the rain. I'm just going to zoom in my bottom clip. I'm only getting the rain from the top clip. And this needs some more editing, but it's a lot more natural than the airplane example. I could go in with some opacity if I want to blur it out just to make it a little bit more natural. So let's just do this effect. I'll get blur, ad that on there and make the amount a little less because the focus of the clip is on the girl that's running, so we don't want to take away from that. And we could just darken, lower the opacity, I mean, for the top clip. So now we have this effect, although the cameras moving forward in the bottom clip and the rain is static. So that's another issue. But that was one example of how you can add rain without having to download three D elements, adding animations to them and all that stuff. So we just dragged in a overlay from the media tab and you can search for certain elements. So let's say I want fire. I get something that's isolated, such as this guy with a black screen, once again, I'll scale it up. I could just go in with one of the brighter blend modes. So it depends on how intense you want this to be. But then I have myself a fire element or this white cloud situation. And it's interesting to see that the white here is completely white because we chose a brighter blend mode. If I choose multiply, this is going to be the exact opposite, and it's actually a pretty cool video effect. The same thing applies here. You can just play around with this. One very common overlay that people like to do is light leaks, and you can search for that. And this just creates a very subtle romanticized mood for your video. So if you're doing a log or something, you may want to look into an effect like this. So I'm just going to choose screen, and you can see that we have this very nice, subtle color changing circles just going all around the video. Just like the previous lesson, we are able to stack effect on top. So let's say this is the first one, and I'm going to look for something else, maybe this more intense version, drag that above, scale it so it fits, and then choose another brightening effect. So maybe brighten or screen, and if it's too intense, I could just lower the opacity. So now, this top effect is blending into the first effect and the base video, and it just goes down from there. So I have something like this. You could add effect onto these as well because they are videos. As we saw, you could add, like, a blur, you could add different things. So there's two effects on these overlays right now, and that looks a lot better. So that's one way to add effects onto your videos. The work is already done. As you saw, I didn't have to make anything. I just dragged in the effect that I wanted. The videos are already there. If you can't find something you're looking for within Capcut, there's so many other resources out there where you could just download overlays for free or the next lesson, we're going to look more into background removal. So you've probably seen green screens, blue screens, and just videos where you want to remove the background completely. So that's going to be something we're going to look at in our next lesson. 7. Green Screen & Background Replacement: Welcome back. Now we're going to be looking into backgrounds. So I will just clear the overlays that we had, and now we're going to look for green screens. And you can see that that is a category within the library. And when you click on it, you're going to see various green backgrounds. So let's just grab something like this lady. She's like, dancing, we could put her in the background, maybe. Let's move this to the corner here. And if you want to get rid of the background, it's very simple. You just scroll down to basic, remove background, actually, and then go to Chroma che. Then you're going to click on the color picker, click once on the green. And when you let go, background is gone. Now, once you've done that, let me push this here. You can change the intensity and basically the edges a little bit. I'm going to zoom in here. So you can see that we have, like, a halo right now and that's not good. So first of all, it's the intensity. So how much do you want removed? We can remove a little bit more. So now it looks there isn't that green halo. And when I play this back, we essentially have this random woman dancing in the bottom of the screen. The same thing applies to everything else. As you can see, we have humans, we have logos, we have items. And we have a lot of screens. So the way you would work with the screens is like this, you drag it in. And this time, instead of having the base video underneath, you're going to have the base video inside the screen. So basically, I'm just going to bring back the video we had. So it's still at the bottom. The only difference is that here, I'm not isolating the center. I'm isolating the background, the surrounding area. So once again, remove background, chroma key, and let go. I have, you know, my subject inside the TV. And the green screen footage is moving as well. You can see that it's zooming into the television, and that's a pretty cool effect. There's a lot of other things like mobile screens, tablets, and anything else. So we have, like, this multi screen situation, too. If you wanted to change the scale of your base video, you can do it by selecting it, going to basic and using the tools here. Just make sure that you're not leaving a black bar. So that's green screens, and some of you may be wondering why is it green? The reason why they choose the color green is because there is less of this bright green in any subject. So this is a very rare color, especially on humans. It's the exact opposite of, you know, skin tones, hair colors, and clothing. So unless someone is wearing this green, the chromake is not gonna be touching any of these subjects. So if you are importing your own videos, just make sure that no matter what your subject has, there is no bright green in the video. So this guy is blue. And I could pinpoint, you know, this darker green and still be able to remove the background. Now, you may have seen that we also have blue screens, so that's the other side of the spectrum. If you pick on this, you can see that we can easily remove blue as well without, again, taking anything from the human subjects. And if you play around with the intensity, you can isolate that a lot better. So blue screens are another set that you can look at. So we got these stuff. And I would say that it's not as common as green screens because this is a color that some people like to use in their videos. But you may have seen the blue screens as well, so I just want to give that a shout out. Now, on another note, you're able to remove backgrounds as they are, as well. So let's say here, I'm going to skip to the end so we don't have the sun in the video, just so that we can see the clear horizon here. You could use custom removal or auto removal. And that's basically going to get rid of the sky for you. So we can't really use chroma key here because we have multiple colors in the background, and the auto removal, it did a decent job. I wouldn't say it's that good, but we could try custom removal as well. So I could just use my brush, start outlining the subject, and then just apply the removal. So that's another way that you could isolate subjects. Or if you don't want to just use one of the green or blue screens. So now that you know how to change the background of your videos and how to isolate subjects, we can now look into blending them with color grading. 8. Advanced Color Grading: So in this lesson, we're going to be focused on how to professionally color grade and how to blend two clips together. So I'm just going to use green screen footage. One more time, I have this person cooking in front of a green screen. And instead of making it look like he's in his basement or something, I'm going to put a very nice background behind him. Just going to look through one where we don't really move. So in the library, I'm going to look for kitchen, and using one of these clips, I'm just going to, you know, choose the frame that I like. Then going up here, I'm going to click on Freeze. So now we have a freeze frame, and I could just get rid of the first bit, scale this up, and I have this image of the kitchen. Now we're going to move the kitchen in the background, have our subject in front. Once again, we're going to remove background with the chroma key and select the green. So just hover over and see which one will give you the best result. I think the issue here is that we have some shadows in our green screen. You can see that there's some dark bits, and it's also reflecting onto the table. Before I start even removing the green from this clip, I need to first fix the darkness and the brightness that we see here. So by having the top clip selected, we're gonna go to adjust. Let's scroll down to lightness, and we're going to lift the shadows. So now this side is less extreme, darken the blacks, and just play around with this until you have a decent Oops. This is Brilliance. Until you have a decent combination. So removing the contrast is gonna help make it flat, and then we could play around with the other sliders. Okay, so that's a little better. I'm just gonna go to video, remove the background now, and it should be better. So let's grab here. I know we're leaving a little bit of this behind. The issue with this clip is that it's reflecting off the table, and that's a problem with the original clip, not so much here. So I'm just going to increase the intensity and then feather the edges. Then using masking, we could sort of save the table. So let's go to the start. Luckily, this clip is not moving, so we don't have to stabilize or motion track anything. Let's duplicate the clip, hold down Alter option, click and drag right above, make sure the two videos are perfectly aligned. The top video, we're going to make a mask only for the table. So I'll use the Pen tool to make it more precise. Try to grab the table the best you can. I'll just close it like this, and then on the top video, we're going to disable Chroma key. See that we got the table back. But then I'm just going to go to the mask again ops and try to find the correct edge of the table. So now we have the table set and everything looks good. If I didn't do this, this is what we were dealing with. The table is, like, fading away, and that's not a good thing. Okay. So now we have our subject in front of the kitchen. Let's blur out the background a little bit to help this blend better. So go to effects. We were already on blur, add it directly onto the kitchen image and blur it slightly. Just like that. Now we could grab these two, right click and hit group. So whatever I apply, it's going to be hit onto one combo. You can see Combo A, Combo A. And when I click on either one, it's going to select both. If you're color grading with a duplicated clip, make sure you follow this step. Alright, so for the color grading, we could do a bunch of stuff. So let's go to adjustment and use the color grading tools to match what we have for the subject with the background. So we're looking at lighting, the vibrancy and any sort of color adjustments. So if, for example, the background clip is very warm, we have to match that with the subject. So you could use Auto adjust or anything that you see up here to make some quick adjustments. There's also a color correction here so you can play around with that. But I'm just going to jump to the adjust panel and do everything myself. So the background video is pretty warm. Let's increase the temperature. To cancel out some of that green, I'm going to introduce some magenta and then saturation. I'm going to lower it a little bit. Then we have the light adjustments that we looked at earlier. So this could be fixing the exposure, lower that and I'm now moving on to HSL, which is hue saturation and luminance and changing each of the colors. So the first thing is to go to green and kill the saturation, so we don't have that green reflection anymore and also any sort of, like, halo effect that we had around. And I think we don't need to do anything else regarding color. Maybe we could, um, lower the saturation, and there we go. That looks a lot better. To finish this off, I'm going to put a overall color adjustment right above. So this could be something from the filters panel. If you scroll down, we have a lot of options. So if you do food, for example, this guy, this is a filter that's applied to everything below it. So I think I will do, let's try something retro. Okay, and then play around with the intensity here. So now I have my subject cutting his mushrooms, I guess, in front of a fake kitchen. We started with a green screen, and then we use color grading techniques to blend this in. So now you know how to overlay stuff, how to use green screens and other background removal techniques. And finally, how to make all of that blend together with color grading. In the next lesson, we're going to look more into thumbnails and especially what really grabs the attention of a viewer on YouTube or Tik Tok, what makes it clickable and how you could, you know, summarize all that's happening in your video onto one image. 9. Designing Clickable Thumbnails: So AI design is where you can make thumbnails really easily and with a few clicks because a lot of the work is done with the prompting and what you ask the AI to make for you. When you click on that, we'll be brought to this interface. And if you want, you could look through some of the examples or just put in your prompt directly. Given that we focused on a cooking video in the last lesson, we kept the green screen, and there was this guy chopping mushrooms in his kitchen. We're going to make a thumbnail for that, and I'll show you how you could take a thumbnail that's not going to be as engaging to something that will engage your audience. So we're going to go over typography, some color psychology, and some layout techniques that you could try. So right over here, I'm going to ask for a thumbnail. So I made a cooking video about mushrooms. Make a thumbnail for YouTube that's colorful and engaging. So we're just going to throw that out there and see what we get. You can see if you're signed into your account. Here is where you get to see how much credit you have left on the bottom of the screen. We have a chat bar on the right, so you get to make your changes and communicate with the AI. And we have some tools here where you could edit things. So this is the thumbnail that I got, and I could make my changes here. So let's say I want the chef to be in the thumbnails, as well, add the chef to the thumbnail. And it's going to change what we were given here. Now, you could also ditch the prompt here and just use the tools that's going to give you a lot more control over where you want that new element to be placed. But the problem with this current thumbnails, let's talk about it a little bit is that it's not as engaging because we don't really have much. So, this is not even a good addition. I'm going to do Command or Control Z. So the issue with this is that we're getting basically a lot of similar colors for the image. So we have a lot of browns, maybe a little green here, but there's nothing that's going to catch someone's eye when they're scrolling. Now, some of the elements that will catch someone's eye is a human figure. So you've probably came across thumbnails where the video has nothing to do with humans. Let's say it's like a knitting tutorial where the whole clip is just someone's hand knitting. But the thumbnail has an image of the knitter or someone from a stock platform. Reason why we put human faces on thumbnails is because psychologically, that's the very thing that we're going to get attracted to when we're looking at images. So we could easily pass this image without feeling anything. But when we recognize another human, we are instantly attracted to that or anything that resembles a human. So you can go through this variation and have it placed a chef on the bottom right, bottom left, what please. Well, that's one of the first tips that you can apply to any video thumbnail that you're making. Second thing is regarding typography. So it should match the vibe that you have in your clip. So if I use a cursive font for this image, it's not really gonna fit well because I'm kind of implying that this is going to be a fine dining experience, and it's going to be a very chill video. But say my video has a lot of jokes in it or it's a lot more different than what's out there. I want to communicate that with my font selection. So we would go with something bold, something big, something chunky, but not anything decorative or script. So you could just ask for the text to be removed and then place your own text using the text tool on the right side, the left side. So now it put back the chef and it left the food as it was. Just go to click on this again and try to remove this guy. So I'm just going to click on this and we could just try one of the tools here. So hit remove and just go over the text with the brush. Once you let go, you can hit generate on the bottom of your screen, and that's going to try to remove this text, and as you can see, did a really good job. So now I could use in paint to add something on there. So let's make this bigger. I'm not sure how it's going to generate a human with this tool, but we could try something. So in the bottom, there's a bar where you could type in your next prompt. So add a chef to the maybe add a chef with a wooden spoon. It generates and let's see what options we get. Now, while that's generating, let's talk a little bit about color psychology. Usually, when you scroll past thumbnails, you may have noticed that there's a lot of bright colors, especially when they're warmer. So a lot of bright reds, lot of yellows, oranges. And the reason for that is because that's an alert color. So when we see that with our eyes, if we are able to see color, we're immediately engaged into why that colors there. So you usually see red for, like, a stop sign or you see it on like a danger sign. Any sort of other sign where it's trying to communicate something urgent. And that's really the point of thumbnails. We are urgently trying to grab the attention of the viewer so you could utilize a lot of the warm bright colors for your thumbnails. If you want to go for something sophisticated, you can use colder colors. So let's say blue for Trust or maybe green for something grounded and earth like. Over here, we have a lot of neutral colors. So brown or this beige color are considered neutral. So it's not really inciting any sort of feeling in the viewer. The one good element that's creating contrast here is the green from the parsley. So if you want to make this more engaging, maybe you could add some flowers, some red flowers or maybe some mushrooms, some tomatoes, sorry, in the background and then use the in paint tool that we're using right now to make it a lot more efficient. Couldn't really do the chef thing, but we could try the tomato because it's one small portion of the image. So let's do cherry tomato. And then the text that I was telling you earlier, it's right over here, so you can add a title or use one of the recommended fonts to make an introduction as to what this video is about. You simply click on it, and it's going to go on your thing. Now, the generation part, it's taking a bit longer. But if you saw that you're running into problems like this, make sure that your prompt is specific. If you just say, put a vegetable there that's not going to work, describe the tomato, describe the color, the state of it, if it's chopped or whole. And if you still run into some problems, you can just hit the refresh button on the top. But generally, just some quick recap of what we went over, try to add a human subject to your thumbnails, add engaging colors, and keep the space relevant to what the videos about. So you can see that the biggest portion of my thumbnail is mushrooms, and that's what we were doing in the clip in the previous lesson. And then once you're done, you can hit Download and use it for your video that you're going to export from CapCut. Return to CapCut, you just hit the X button and click on Home. So that's how you can design thumbnails. As you can see, it's very easy. We did not leave CapCut, and this comes in handy when you have a lot of clips to work on and not enough time to work on your thumbnails. Now that we have the basic skills under our belt for more advanced training, we can apply it in the next chapter where we're going to be building a project from scratch. We're going to be building a horror clip. And the reason for that is because horror clips are the perfect situation where you get to do a lot of audio blending, sinking, overlay, color grading, and other stuff because you're really trying to create that scary mood and heighten everyone's senses. So let's go ahead and jump into our class project. 10. Class Project: Cinematic “Scary Clip”: Project Setup & Concept: Mm hmm. For the class project, we're going to be building a cinematic scary clip using everything that we have learned so far. So first, let's make a project. And I'm going to be importing footage from the Capcut library. If you guys search the same thing, you should be able to see them. If not, you could go ahead and use other platforms to download some free clips. So first, let's go to the library, and I'm just going to brainstorm as to what I want the focus of my video to be. So I'm thinking a lot of sound effects and things that I could use overlays to make it more intense. So I definitely want something with a forest in there. We can make this a lot more eerie if we add the correct color grading and some overlays, as I mentioned. So I'm thinking we have, like, a ghost in different places. So it's in the forest. And then it follows the subject home. It's like, by the door, and it's just haunting the subject, which is the viewer in different ways. For that, I'm just going to search for forest, and I'm going to grab the ones that I think will be good for this. So we have this moonlight. I'm just going to cut out the rest later. We have the forest. You could double click to see a preview. I think this panning motion is going to work well. Basically, because it's horror, I want things to be very slow. So if there's any sort of zoom or panning, I want that to be in a controlled way, so slow motion. Got some trees here where we're walking through the forest, so that could be the subject, trying to run away from the ghost. And I think that's enough regarding forest. Now we can look for, you know, when the ghost follows the subject in their home. So let's say door, look for door. This guy looks interesting. This could be the end scene, which is when the subject opens the door and, like, the ghost pops out or something. So drag that in, and we got a bunch of interesting options. I'll use this guy. And we could even add some ghost footage. Capcot has a lot of stuff that you could use. There's even some with a black screen that you could blend into the footage. Like, we learned already, but I'm trying to find something that's, you know, suitable. So we have some ghost clips, some zombie ones like this. But let's see. So we have ghost busters here. I think what I will do is look for a room, like an empty room, and, like, we could add some sound effects for footsteps. So this is actually pretty good. And I'm looking for horizontal clips because that's the dimension for my entire project. So just looking at some of the videos. I'm not sure what that was. Oops. This guy, drag that in and just build the basic sequence for your project. I think the last thing I want is curtains, some wind. Okay, and then we can do and I think for now, I'm just going to stop with the clips because I have plenty right here in my sequence. So these are the clips that I chose. Notice how all of them are they have slow movements, and if they don't, you can kind of use that to your advantage where we're creating panic. So let's say this is the subject. They find the ghost or sort of panicking in this room. But the other parts, we could create that eerie mood where, like, the ghost is coming. Then there's the forest, got the moon, and then we could do I think a stare video as well, like walking up the stairs. So this is like the ghost coming up to the subject. It works in our favor. Okay, so we have this sequence. You guys can add more if you want, but try to think of the story line here and how you plan on integrating sound effects and overlays to create that scary feeling. So before I move on, I do want to trim out anything I don't want from these videos, such as this guy. I don't want the second clip. I think that was a dinosaur, but I'm just going to make a cut right here with Command or Control B and hit backspace to delete the extra bit. We have this forest scene. I'm going to stop it and cut it at this moment, and I'm just working through each clip. So this guy is okay. This guy is fine. This is fine. Here I want it to be stable, and then we have the video playing. And then, lastly, we have the staircase. I'm going to stop it here before we actually make it to the top. Now, here it's a great opportunity because the door opens, but it just stays on that scene for a bit longer. We could actually use one of the ghost overlays here. So let me just find that real quick. Horror overlay. Maybe this clip, that could be our ghost. And because he is surrounded by black, we could kind of blend that into our second clip easily. So I'll just put this above, and I'll keep the clips where the part of the clip where he's, like, surrounded the head is surrounded and get rid of the extras. Okay, so now this guy we could kind of have pop out of nowhere, and that's like the jump scare. And then we're going to work on the sequence. So what should come first, and then what should follow after. So I think the moon is a great opening. We have, like, the forest, but I do want this clip to be in between. So we have one forest shot, then we have this door thing, another forest, one, this guy I wanted at the end. Let's take the overlay with it. Maybe the subject wakes up, or let's put this first. So there's, like, you know, a sensation that something came into the house, like, makes their way up the stairs. Then the room is, like, empty, subject wakes up, panics, opens the door, and then the ghost pops. That's my sequence. It's currently a minute and 8 seconds, but we're going to play around with that in the upcoming lessons. So make sure that you have your sequence of base clips, kind of figure out what storyline you want to follow, or if you just want to follow along what I have here. Trim your clips, put them in the right order, and then we can move on with wrapping some sound and then doing some color grading to bring this whole thing together. 11. Blending Sound with Atmosphere: Now, let's look for some sounds that can complement this scary clip. The first thing we need is a overall scary background music. So let's go to audio, and let's see if there is a category for horror. But we could just look for something here. Give this a listen. So I will choose this one. It's a ghost stories background music, so it's kind of perfect. Drag that underneath, and I'll get rid of the excess by hitting Command or Control B. And it works perfectly with the moon opening. Okay. So now that we have the background setup, you can make the decision as to whether you want a narration for this project, so someone saying something or if you want to just leave it as. So now is a good time to see if you want to add a narrator. So someone who's saying something over all of these clips, maybe talking about the ghost in past tense or something like that. I'm going to leave mine blank as indoors just instruments and sound effects. But if you do want to add some talking over the video, you could use the AI text to speech on Capcod. You just have to go to the browser for that. Make your changes, choose your sound, and then download it, import it here, just like we did in the previous chapters. So now looking at this, I'm going to start choosing some sound effects. So for this one, the sound effect that I'm thinking is, like, heavy breathing or like some sort of monster sounds. Here maybe like the door creaking open, maybe some footsteps on leaves, some wind, foot up the stairs, and you can kind of pair it well with what you see on the screen. So let's go to sound Effects and start looking for things we need. So let's look for monster. Yeah. So that's perfect. We're going to drag that right above the forest, the forest video, and then cut out the excess. Well, actually, I think, I'll extend it to all three because we have forest, something else than forest. But here, it starts like that, then maybe door hinge. Okay, I think the first one is good. I'm going to put this for the last clip, actually. For this, maybe you put lightning sounds. That could work. Okay, drag that right here and we're going to, you know, cut it from where the lightning actually shows up. Do that with steps So this one, I think I'll pair it with the background music, the original one maybe put it somewhere here and it starts where the ghost sort of wakes up. So let's put it a little bit after the creepy door. This guy I'll put this for the stair scene. And then footsteps on leaves just to be specific here. So just drag that right here. We have some wind else. So maybe just wind. Sometimes it's hard to find something you need. Okay, this works. So I'm just going to put this right here. And one important thing with audio when it comes to professional editing is that you do want them to sort of overlap so that you have enough space to fade in and fade out or do any other sort of blending. So I'm going to cut this here and then maybe some heavy breathing here because the subject is looking for the ghost. H. Okay, this is more natural. I'm going to put this maybe from here on just because the subject is looking for him. He's waking up, and then, you know, they open the door and the ghost shows up. So we have a bunch of different audios. I'm just going to cut this guy real quick. And I think that's pretty much all we need regarding audios. We can always come back and get more. But as you can see, I still have not left Capcut. Everything is already here, and that's the great thing about using it. So now let's focus on the different audios. I'm first going to match the first one. So we have the music for the first scene. Okay, so even without editing the audios to blend them, it still sounds pretty good. So mood wise, I've accomplished what I was looking for. The one thing that you may have noticed is that a lot of the large basically louder audios, they end abruptly. Okay. So a lot of the louder audios do need to be, you know, faded out. So you can see it just cuts out, and then the stare is not really matched with the actual movement of the camera, so we do have to match that. And I saw somewhere where yeah, like, around the end of this video, the camera pans to a random person, so I'm going to cut that out. But overall, I just have to work on sinking and playing around with the different volumes. So make sure you were able to follow along until this part. If you want more audios, now's the time to bring them in because once you attach them to a clip or blend the entire sequence, it's going to be hard to disturb what you have already to add something new. So let's go ahead and do that and continue our project in the next lesson alongside some color grading. 12. Editing with Markers & Timing: So now let's continue our project, and we're first going to start by mixing in and syncing our audio. So as we saw in the previous lesson, the stare audio is not matched with the camera movement, and some of these audios are either way too loud or they're too low and we can't really hear them. So let's start at the beginning. So the first two audios, I think sound wise, they're okay. If you are adding dialogue, make sure that you listen back to it and lower the volume for the two music so that they could hear what the person is saying. But we don't have any dialogue here, so that's okay for me. But we do have this thunder. So I'm going to see if this is loud enough. That's okay. Let's hear the footsteps. So the wind is too loud, so I'm just going to click on it and lower the volume. All right. Now comes the stairs. Using markers, I'm going to hit M on the part where I want there to be a footstep sound, matching it with the stair that we're moving past. So let's zoom in. Hit M to make that marker. Okay, so we have four steps, and you can see the sound waves. So just try to match that with the markers. Gonna cut this like that. The second one, we may have to split it. So Command or Control B and then match this with the other marker and just continue going forward. Okay, get rid of the rest. And this first part is a little weird Zoom in effect. So I'm just going to start the clip from right this part. There we go. Let's check the audio. Match it again. Okay. Then the last one, I'll just move it forward. So that there's no stair sounds in the room. Then we have deep breathing. And then the door sound. Okay. I I cut the excess, and this is heavy breathing. I think I'll have it stopped by here. You could add a scream sound effect for the monster, but I'm not going to do that. Let's just drag this in. There we go. So now in terms of volume and placement, my audio is perfect. We do have to deal with the cutouts. So right now, if you look at this audio, you can see that it fades in. So that indicates that we don't really need to do any sort of adjustment. Here we have the rain sound just suddenly start. So if you zoom in here, you can see that there's no fade in, and we could easily do that by grabbing the little circle and just pulling it towards the right. And I'm going to have the sound effects start a little bit earlier than the actual video. And that way, we can sort of introduce the sound before we actually see the screen. Maybe fade in more. Let's fade out on the other end. Okay, and we have the footsteps. The same issue. You can see that it's starting out of nowhere. Just drag that in. Repeat that with the end. The steps are fine. The winds out. Got to do that, too. And the rest is okay. I'm just going to fade out the audio by, like, 7 seconds, so really long, just to compliment that eerie mood that we built. So the video ends here. They can see it sort of like zooms out, and it's pretty good. Alright, so my audio is complete. The next thing we're going to do is color grade each of these clips just to make it look more scary, and then we're going to add in the overlays. So starting with the first clip, I think this is pretty cool. The second one is during the day, so we're going to turn it to night by using some color grading. Click on the Forest video and then go to adjust, scroll down, and we have the adjust sliders that we could utilize here. So the night is cold. Bring this towards the left. Tint. Let's make it purple. Saturation. We're going to leave it. Lower the exposure quite a bit. Highlight, lower that, too. And you can see that we're sort of, like, making everything more dim. Decrease the blacks, and then we could decrease the whites, too. I'm just going to go to whites and increase it a little more. And now using filters, I could turn it to night by putting in an overall blue filter. So let's type night. Now I'm just gonna add the black gold filter on this just to make it a little bit more intense. Add some winner to the end, and now we have this creepy looking mood. Save this as a preset, and I'm just going to scroll up and basically repeat the same thing with the other ones. For some of them, you can add a filter just to make things more convenient. We'll go with this guy. This is way too bright and make it darker. And you can see that just by making things darker, you kind of add that horror movie effect. Same thing here. We have a very bright forest. To darken that, make it colder, little purple. And I'll try one of these filters. Maybe add some wig towards the end. We have the room, and it's basically the same thing. Just play around with the different sliders until you get a weird creepy ibe. The reason why I'm not adding one filter to everything is because we're dealing with different lighting, and you would have to adjust each one separately. So I just like to go in with each of the sliders and get more control over how the clip is going to turn out. So this guy is way too bright. We need to really make this less lovely. And sometimes when you remove the saturation, you make it less appealing anyway. So lower the saturation, but not exactly black and white. Something like that, and then we get more wig, got this room. And then finally the door. This guy could use a little bit of desaturation, coldness, and some of that. Okay, so now all of my clips have a weird, desaturated and darkened look to them, which is very suitable for the horror film. Now, in terms of transitions, I'm not going to be adding any just because the rough cuts are gonna help in my case because everything is uneasy and not smooth in a horror setting. But if you want, there's so many that you could look over. And because we have a sequence, you just drag it in between the two clips. So now that I have this in the next lesson, I'm going to start adding in some overlays. Oh 13. Effects & Overlays for Horror Mood: So let's add in some overlays and add some additional textures and elements. So this right here, not much to do. But since we have a thunder sound effect here, I'm going to add, like, a rain overlay. So go to media library, look for a rain overlay. There's tons of things that you could look at. I'm going to go for this one, it's straight down. And then we're gonna just, uh go to video, basic, blend and choose overlay or perhaps screen, actually. So, there it is. We have some rain. We're just going to add some blur effect here for the rain only. Drag that in, lower the amount. Okay. Then we have the forest. I'm not going to do much here, but I think for here, this is where we got to, you know, introduce our monster. So I'm going to drag this in towards the part where he opens the door, select the video above, and then choose screen right here. So you can see that because he was surrounded by the black, it actually helps a lot in our case. So let's grab this clip and put him somewhere in the corner away from the light. Let's mute all of these for a second. Uh I'm just making sure that he's in the screen the entire time. Alright, so you can see that he's sort of there at the beginning, but I want to do some very simple animations. And the first thing I want to do is just go a couple frames forward until where I want his head to be, and we're going to do a position and scale keyframe. Then we're going to go back to the beginning, a little bit, offset it, and then do another scale and position. Now, at the beginning, we're gonna remove the scale completely so that it's a tiny little video and then use the same thing for position to put him somewhere like that. Scale equals zero, so it sort of just pops in like that. I do want to mask out the unnecessary parts. I think I'll stop the clip somewhere around here. And then with the masking feature, we're going to remove the excess area that does not involve the subject, the head of the ghost, in this case. Just do that. Okay. And we're going to feather the edges, and I'm just going to play this back. Make sure that we don't cut any part of the head. Okay. Now, the ghost head is a little bit faded. So what I'm going to do is just hold down Commander Option or Alt, click and drag above to make a duplicate. And you can see how now he is more pronounced, and we could sort of see the head. You could do this one more time to get another result. Just make sure that you're not moving the key frames. So we have this effect right now, and the head is a lot, you know, more visible. Near here, we could do a sudden effect, maybe a glitch effect or something like that, just to end the video, glitch effect, maybe. Okay. I'm going to add that to the one on top. Maybe have it start towards the end. Mm hmm. At the speed, add to the speed. So we get something crazy like that. And then the video ends. So we're gonna stop here for this lesson and then finish everything, do some final polishing, and then export the video in our next lesson. 14. Final Edit & Export: Mm hmm. Welcome back. Now we're going to finish off the scary project by doing some final touches. We pretty much have the entire concept there, all the overlays, all the color grading, and the sound is perfectly blended. Now, one thing that I did want to do was add some additional scary overlays just to make this more intense. You can leave it as it is, but I want to try a few things. So let's search for horror overlay, and I'm just going to see my options. So we have this, like, grain effect that I'm going to put above the moon. Video that we have in the beginning. Then I'm just gonna blend it with screen, so we get this, like, film effect. So it's like the past, the ghost has risen or something, and then we jump into reality. I did want to put it here as well. Maybe this store is, like, related to the ghost. So we're just gonna put that on there. And it helps that there is, like, a thunder sound effect in the background. That works just fine. Now, I can see this eye video, which I think is interesting. I think I'll just put it in between this video just because it's very chill and relaxed. So in order to change that, I'm just going to make cuts with Commander Control B and replace these little bits with that eye video. So we get a subtle liquor effect just by replacing the two clips. Okay, let's put this guy above the first video and then make the same cuts on this with Commander Control B. I'm gonna do it from the right side. Okay, so now I'm just gonna get rid of the bigger portions of the top video. So just get rid of those. And then we're going to get rid of the I have to put them in here first because we have snapping turned on and then get rid of the little sections of the original video. So we get something like this. So it's like flashing like that. And to make this more intense, we could speed up the cuts near the end here. We're going to have the original play for a little while. Then we're going to make smaller cuts and more frequently. So cut, cut, cut, and just keep going like that. Try to make them as random as possible because if it's too uniform, it's not going to be as intense. And then at the end, I'm going to have the eye video play for longer. So now I'm just going to get rid of the little cuts that we made and replace it with the video above. So same thing. We're going to first stretch this all the way to the end and make the little cuts. You can use your arrow key to make this faster, right arrow key to move to the right, forward, and left arrake to move backwards. Okay. I'm gonna zoom into my timeline and just clean this up. Dig this in between. So we have a more intense waking up effect, use the next scene is, you know, him looking up at the roof of the room, which we could assume is him waking up because of the ghost. So we have this effect. And I think I will have the ev Video play a little longer. So let's do that. Okay, that was perfect. Turn these back on and Dapple check that the audios are okay. Break it. So now I could export my video. We have a lot of things going on, but overall, it's looking pretty good. I do want to darken this last clip a little bit more just because it looks very bright and normal here. So let's go to adjust, and I'm going to add a keyframe. So right before he opens the door, we're going to make an adjust keyframe, then move forward to when the door is fully open and make another keyframe. On the second keyframe, you can see that it made a keyframe for every little slider, you're going to make things a little bit more dark. So exposure, make that low, more contrast, lower that saturation, highlights, and just keep going. So now we get this transition darkens, and we get, like, the pop in. With the ghost. I do want the pop effect to be a little bit more smooth. So right at this second keyframe, I'm going to make one for opacity, and we're gonna fix that up. So let's find adjust. Oh, let's go to video. Make a keyframe for opacity at 100%, and then go towards the center and just make this zero. I think the same thing for the other duplicates. Key frame, key frame, and then go back. We did 0%. So same thing, 0%, and then 0%. Alright. I think the mask does need to be a little bit more smooth. I think this guy has the effect. I'm going to switch out the glitch effect for something a little bit less colorful. So let me see what this is. We have pixel glitch. I'm going to try that out. I think this is better. So when he opens the door, we get, you know, this guy starting to glitch. And then everything fades to black. All right. So let's go ahead and export this. It's very simple, as we know, we just hit Export to scary movie or scary clip. Choose the location. Then you can decide on the format and everything else, but I'm going to leave things as they are. Just make sure that you have audio checked or else it's going to be a muted video. So this is our video. Let's see what it looks like. So I hope you guys enjoyed the class project and that you had fun with it. You can take this two very different types of videos, maybe a fun one, a dramatic one and just play around with the different moods. The most important thing is being able to, you know, start with a strong concept and then try to recreate the mood using the transitions, color grading, overlays, and everything else that we have learned so far. In the next chapter, we're going to be looking at CapcaD mobile and learn a few things about how we could edit there. 15. CapCut Mobile: Mobile Transitions & Motion Effects: So this is the Capcot mobile home screen. It's pretty much the same idea that we've been looking at for the past few chapters. But essentially, this lesson, we're going to look at how we could add some of the effects and transitions that we've been learning about, but inside the mobile version. So I'm going to click on New Project, and that's going to prompt me to import some clips from my photo library. So I'm just going to do that real quick and then we'll be back so we could continue. You go to the library on the top part of the screen, you're going to get the same stock footage that we've been using inside the Textile version. So we have the green screen over here, the background, the overlays that we discussed, and so many other stuff. So I'm just going to grab a few of these live categories, just so we can experiment inside a project. So let's grab a couple nice ones with groups. Just clicking on them, we'll bring them into the selection. And if you want to get rid of that, you just click on the minus at the bottom. So I have four clips. Let's add all of them at the bottom of the screen, and this is our timeline. Using your two fingers, you can zoom out from the timeline and begin putting in some transitions. For the mobile version, it automatically adds the final screen, but you're able to remove that. So just click on it and hit Delete. That's just done by Capcod mobile. It's not a thing in the desktop version, but it sounds like you have to pay for it in order to remove it. Okay, so let's add in some of that overlay that we talked about. I'm going to add some light leaks, just as we did in the previous lesson. We're going to hit on Add overlay and then come back to the same library. So the first screen you're going to see is your own photo library on your device. But if you just go to library here, you will come to the same screen. So instead of searching, I think I'll just grab the light leaks here so we got one right in the front, and I'll grab. I think that's the one I'm going to grab for now. So select that. If you click on it again, that's going to give you a preview, and I'll do one with a heart. Click on add and now we have the overlay underneath, but it's technically above the video. Okay, so now we're just going to click on that overlay, head down to splice, and we're gonna find I can't find screen for some reason. Just do Dutch or I think, in this case, softlight would work. But you can use Dodge as well. I'll do Dodge, but I'll remove the intensity. And now we got ourself an overlay. The same thing can be applied here. You just click on overlay at the bottom, and you choose that additional clip. So let's do something here. Once again, we're going to have that selected. Go to slice at the bottom and choose one of the options. So I'll do this, and I'll position this towards the center, so click and hold and then move it to where you want it to go, and I'll increase the size so that it's covering the entire screen. So now we get this very simple overlay efet I could match that with when they throw their hats. Let's go backwards. And we got ourselves two effects that we already did in the desktop version, but we can easily replicate that within the mobile version. Next thing is regarding animations. So there is a dedicated animations section at the bottom when you select your video. When I click on it, we get all of these different transitions. So if I click on let's say Scroll app, we're going to get this very simple effect applied to the beginning of our video. Just like that, if you go to adjust, we have all of those color grading features, so you could use it to maybe darken something, get brighter, and just continue on making your selection. Oops. So then you get adjustment layers. You don't normally get this within the desktop version. But for mobile, you can see that it's a different interface. Now, the one thing you don't have here is the keyframes for adjustments. So when you go and adjust, we don't really have the option to add a certain change to 1 second of the video and then, transition to another second. That seems to be an option for the desktop, and it makes sense because you can't really work with the curves of the keyframes using your fingers, whereas on the computer you have your mouse, you have the track pad, and it's a lot more efficient. That's pretty much how you could add overlays and effects to your clips within the Capgod mobile interface. In the next lesson, we're going to focus more on titles and some motion that you could apply. 16. Titles & Motion Text: Welcome back. Now we're going to work on some titles. So titles are very easy to add within Capgad Mobile. You simply go to text, and you have the option to draw stuff. Since you're using your fingers here, you have the options to use some of the templates that are available. So let's do one of these. And easily I could turn my static video into something more engaging. And just like any other layer, you can click and hold to move this title anywhere else. Another thing that you have is the cover option. So you're able to add a cover from the video itself, what you have on the timeline. You can edit the screenshot that we have right now by adding in some more text. So let's hoops make this a little smaller, put it in the corner. Then delete that extra semiclumn then hit safe. So now I have my own thumbnail, essentially. My video. You don't have the AI design within Capcod mobile, but you are able to use other AI features here. So you have AI packeting which is going to be regarding captions, audio, and you have auto captions. Same thing from desktop. And regarding other AI things, you have the AI Media. So we have AI image, AI video, and AI dialogue scene. Those are things that we looked at within the desktop version as well. We also have the AI Avatar, which is going to be regarding a fake AI character that's going to maybe speak for you, point to things. You can do video to avatar, photo to avatar, change their expressions, lip sync, and many other things. The key thing about Capcod mobile is that there's a lot of quick effects that you can apply. And I'm not talking about the effects or transitions where it does a certain thing. I'm talking about some of the tools that we have down below. So if you select a video right here, you're going to get a bunch of options on the bottom. So the first one is all the way towards the right side. You can retouch automatically. We have AI remove, AI remix, changing the eye colors. If you get a red eye effect, you can fix that. Some lip syncing. You also have camera tracking within the mobile and a bunch of the other stuff that is available on Deckstop. But these are all tools that you can experiment with. I could try maybe AI remove here. I agree. It's going to open up this interface, and I'm going to brush over those two people in the background. Once I'm done, I'm going to hit Remove. And you can see that the same AI model is being utilized here. You can minimize this and continue doing your work. But if you want a quick fix with a clip that you took with your mobile, you don't have to, you know, import it into the desktop version and remove it. If you click on it, you can see that we got this one in the corner, and that's the AI remove. You know, currently being applied, it's at 48%. We could try a few things with audio here. Let's go to sounds, grab something like this where's the audio. Add it in. And I'm going to click and drag it so that it starts with the rest of our click. Now, to recreate that audio blending, you're able to do that here as well. So let's go to sounds and bring in a random audio, and I'm just going to build this up. So we go to click away. We have that first audio. We can do another one. So we have some sound effects. Let's look for laugh laughs for a group because we have a group. Here what we have here. I'll go with the second one. And you can see that now I have two different audios right above each other. I could click on volume to make it lower if needed, and just go about adding some more. We have some audio effects as well. If you want to quickly maybe remove background music, highlight one particular speaker, you can do it just like that. Can also switch audios to different characters. So if I click on this audio, the music, go to Audio Effects. You can do voice characters and maybe turn this into Mini. You have recorded a video of yourself and you're talking in that video, you have the option to do some silly effects, such as going over let's say this is my voice recording, such as going over to audio effects, voice characters and turning yourself into Minion or Homer. This will not work with audios that you bring from Capcot to make sure that you have access and rights over the video that you're going to apply this to. So our background removal is done, but it couldn't do it. And the mobile version is not as good, but hopefully it gets better as we move forward. So that's just a quick overview of the mobile version. You can see a lot of the stuff is pretty much the same, whether it's on Dektop or mobile, and they're just put in different places. But you can use the mobile version. If you want to do something quick, you want to add an effect without having to go into details. Use the dektop for when you want advanced techniques such as key framing, animation, curving, and all that stuff because in the mobile, those features are not there. So I hope you guys now have a better understanding of the mobile version. Now that we know how to use the mobile version, we can move on to our next chapter. 17. Where to Next: So you have now completed all of the chapters. I hope you guys found this helpful and we're able to follow along for all of our exercises. The next step from here is to continue on practicing. There's so much that's going to be added to CapcoT in the following months or years. Always try to update your workflow, try new things. If you're within a community which I highly recommend, make sure to share your creations and receive feedback on them because that's really the best way that you're going to grow. So I hope you guys enjoyed the course, and I hope to see you guys in the next one. 18. Class Project: Create a Cinematic Video: Now it's your turn. For the class project, you're going to be creating your own cinematic short film. The goal here isn't to just edit, but to create a mood. So this could be something scary, something fun, inspiring, or anything else that you wish to go for. Start by planning out your concept. How do you want your audience to feel after watching your video? Then you're going to gather your clips and import them into Capcut. As you build your video, focus on the following things. Using markers to mark the beats so that you can sync your audios, working with multi track layers and learning how to blend different audios together, using color grading to create a more cinematic look, adding visual effects such as shadows, g, and flickerings, and finally, some keyframes to make your motions more smooth. Finally, export your video, and if you like, create a thumbnail that can go with it. Upload your final video or screenshots of it to the class project gallery alongside a note that can explain your concept. Maybe some of the challenges that you faced. I will be reviewing the projects from time to time, and I always found it interesting how different students approach the program. Good luck on the project, and let's see what you guys come up. 19. Congratulations! What’s Next?: You have now reached the advanced level of CapGuT. Congratulations. You know how to control timing, use keyframes, adjust different audios, blend them, and use visual effects on top of your videos. These are the very elements that can transform your videos from ordinary to engaging and polished. From here, the biggest difference comes from intention. Every cut, sound, and effect should serve a purpose. And at this level, improvements comes from practice and attention to detail. If you have not uploaded your project already, be sure to do that, as I'd love to see what you guys have made. Thank you for taking the class, and I hope to see you guys in the next.