CapCut is a popular free video editing app for mobile devices. With CapCut, you can easily trim, splice, and rearrange clips, add audio and visual effects, include captions and stickers, and more to create professional-looking videos.
One of the most useful features in CapCut is the ability to add and customize keyframe effects on your clips. Keyframes allow you to define custom animation effects at specific points in your video. For example, you can use keyframes to gradually zoom in on a clip, create a smooth pan effect, customize opacity and rotation changes, and much more.
Table of Contents
An Introduction to Keyframes
Before diving into how to use keyframes in CapCut, it helps to understand what keyframes are:
- Keyframes are frames in a video clip that define the start and end points of an effect, transition, or animation sequence.
- You add keyframes at strategic points and customize the values in between to create smooth changes over time rather than abrupt transitions.
- Effects, motion, opacity levels, positions, scales, and rotations can all be adjusted using keyframes in CapCut.
- Multiple keyframe effects can be added to the same clip for advanced video edits.
Adding and Adjusting Keyframes in CapCut
Adding and customizing keyframes effects in CapCut is easy once you know the basic steps:
1. Select the Clip
Start by tapping the clip you want to add a keyframe effect to in order to select it. Make sure there are no other clips selected.
2. Open Effects Controls
Tap on the magic wand icon at the bottom to open up the Effects control panel.
3. Choose Keyframe Type
Scroll down and tap on the effect you want to apply – Zoom, Position, Rotation, Anchor Point, Opacity, or Scale. For this example, we’ll use Scale.
4. Add Keyframes
Tap the stopwatch icon to enable keyframes for that effect. Adjust the slider to your desired starting scale level – for example 50%. Next, move the playhead to where you want the effect to end. Adjust the scale slider again, for example to 100%, to set the end point.
5. Customize Animation
Now that you have the start and end keyframes set, you can further customize the animation. Move the playhead to different points between the start and end keyframes and adjust the slider to change the scale levels at different points of the clip. The changes will animate smoothly between your custom keyframes.
6. Review and Adjust
Scrub through the timeline and watch your customized scale animation on the clip based on the keyframes you set. Make any further adjustments needed to polish the effect.
Keyframe Effect Examples and Ideas
Here are just some of the cool effects you can create in your CapCut videos using keyframes:
- Zoom in/out – Have your clip smoothly zoom in from a wide shot to a close up or vice versa using the scale and position keyframes.
- Focus shifts – Stack clips on top of each other with opacity keyframes to transition focus between foreground and background elements.
- Text/image emphasis – Use scale and opacity keyframes to draw attention to text captions or images at strategic points.
- Smooth pans – Add anchor point and position keyframes to create cinematic pans across your clips.
- Spinning transitions – Place rotation keyframes to make clips smoothly spin in or out of the frame.
- Animated captions – Make text captions slide, fade, zoom or flip onto the screen using keyframes instead of just abruptly appearing.
The possibilities are endless! Get creative with stacking keyframe effects to make truly eye-catching CapCut videos.
Keyframe Effect Tips and Tricks
Here are some handy tips when working with keyframes in CapCut:
- You can add unlimited keyframes to a clip – use as many as you need to achieve the effect you want.
- Use the curve editor to fine-tune the timing and acceleration/deceleration of animations between keyframes.
- Keyframes effects can be copied and pasted onto other clips once customised to your liking.
- Lower the opacity levels on stacked clips with effects rather than removing them so you can always go back and adjust them later if needed.
- Use split screen templates to only apply effects to certain areas of the frame rather than the whole clip.
- Don’t forget sound effects! Add keyframed audio effects alongside visual animations to further emphasise them.
