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Why CapCut's AI Tools Are Great
Are CapCut's AI Tools Free?
How I Use CapCut's Smart Ads Generator
How I Use CapCut's Smart Templates
Key Takeaways
CapCut's AI tools make video editing easy, including text-to-speech and long video to short-form converter. Many of CapCut's AI tools are available for free users, such as Smart Templates and Smart Ads generator. Smart Ads and Smart Templates in CapCut save time in the video creation process, especially for advertising and trending audio videos.
CapCut is the best short-form video editing tool around. But with the addition of its AI editing tools, it's my go-to video editor, and it should be yours too.
Why CapCut's AI Tools Are Great
CapCut is my go-to video editing app, especially when creating short-form videos on my iPhone. I prefer the app over its desktop version, as more tools are available on the mobile app. The AI tools are harder to access -- and sometimes not available -- on the desktop app, but they are on CapCut's browser version.
CapCut has lots of AI tools and features to make your video editing easy. There's the text-to-speech tool which lets you choose voices and even languages for narration. You can edit using your video's transcript which allows for more precision. And the long video to short-form video converter is another great way to create short-form videos with CapCut's AI.
The AI tools in CapCut's platform are helpful, not gimmicky, and save time in the video editing process. There are some fun features like image editors that allow you to add stickers or text effects to your videos, too, but overall, CapCut's AI video tools make sense to use and lots of them are free.
Download: CapCut for iOS | Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
Are CapCut's AI Tools Free?
CapCut is a freemium tool which has loads available for free users to make you wonder if CapCut Pro is even worth subscribing to. Many of CapCut's AI tools are available on the free plan, something not many creative programs offer.
The huge number of AI tools makes it hard to decide which ones are actually good, but the good ones are AI tools worthy of using in real-world situations. CapCut's Smart Templates and Smart Ads generator are two of the best free tools, especially for creating short-form videos.
While there are some AI tools only available on the Pro plan, here are some of the great free AI tools:
Script to video Smart Ads Transcript-based editing tool Text-to-image AI poster maker AI model
The Pro AI tools are worth considering investing in CapCut Pro. With the Pro plan you can use the CapCut teleprompter when filming, have access to more AI effects for your images, and translate videos. Another great Pro AI tool is the Relight feature, letting you add dynamic lighting to your video -- for relighting images, you can use the Relight feature in ClipDrop for free.
Many CapCut Pro features let you utilize the free AI tools to their fullest, such as detecting all filler words in your speech -- which is free -- but then using the Pro feature to delete them all in one fell swoop. The same can be said for using AI to create captions from your transcript -- free -- but you need the Pro version to make the captions look fun and interesting.
Depending on your region, you may see some different Pro or Free features than other regions. And sometimes tools are not always available on the desktop app compared to the browser or phone app.
How I Use CapCut's Smart Ads Generator
CapCut's Smart Ads generator is a feature to create adverts quickly, without spending a day filming, or needing to write a script. Strictly speaking, you don't have to use this for commerce adverts, but that's the intention. The Smart Ads generator is great for advertising your TikTok Shop products; it integrates directly with Amazon, Shopify, and TikTok Shop.
You can access this tool from the phone app via Smart Ads and from the browser version under the Magic Tools section, named One-Click Video Creation. The feature works the same on both the phone app and browser version, despite the different names.
Create a Smart Ad
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Once the tool is selected, add the product information for your advert, such as the URL, so viewers can access the link to buy the advertised product. Add your media of videos and images. Then add the product information, including the product's name and any features it has. CapCut's AI can suggest features if you're unsure.
Then you can add information about the brand selling the product: the brand name and target audience. Finally, add the price of the product, any promotional details you want the video to focus on -- like a 50% discount -- and choose the duration of your video.
Select Confirm and Generate, and after a few seconds, you'll have a variety of videos to choose from based on your prompt information.
You can easily change text (and the AI model's narration), switch out video or images, change the duration, and more. The Smart Ads function saves a bunch of time in the creation process, and allows you to focus on fine-tuning your perfect video ad.
How I Use CapCut's Smart Templates
I use CapCut's Smart Templates all the time when creating short-form videos for my social media. It works great when creating videos with trending audio when I don't want to spend the time splitting, cutting, and editing my video sections.
The Smart Templates are like regular Templates, but they use AI to analyze your video input and create the best-timed video output with the audio in the template. You can either search "smart templates" in the search bar of the Templates page, or you can scroll through any of the templates and look for the Smart Templates sparkly diamond icon in the top left corner.
Create a Smart Template Video
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Once you've found the Smart Template you want to use, select it to preview the template video, and then select Use Smart Template. Choose all the video clips you want to apply to the template and write a description of your video under the selected clips. You can also select the duration or use the default duration CapCut creates. Once all that is chosen, select Preview.
Once the preview is complete, you can edit things manually. The media, audio, or text can all be edited individually, or you can head to the Go to Edit button to edit everything in one place.
The text can be edited in multiple ways. You can change the wording -- the AI may not have generated fitting text -- the timing, how often and where the text displays throughout your video, and, of course, you can change the font, style, and color of the text.
The video clips are set to the audio, but they can both be edited. Whether you want to replace, remove, or lengthen the clips, you can. If you change the timing of the clips, it may no longer match the audio CapCut's AI set your video to. This warning goes for changing the audio too; if you want the clips to transition to the beat, it's best to leave the audio and clip length as they are.
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Once you're happy with the video, select Export. Depending on your export choice, you may have the CapCut logo watermarked on the top corner. If you export as a TikTok video saved to your device, you can avoid the watermark -- and you don't have to upload it to TikTok.
As someone who isn't heavily into the short-form video trend, I do occasionally create these videos for my personal and professional social channels. CapCut is always my go-to video editing tool and using its AI video features saves me so much time and stress, whether the videos are just for fun or professional purposes.
