[Shorts Studio] #13 How To Edit Shorts With CapCut (5 Easy Steps)

Welcome to Module 4-Lesson 3 of AI Shorts Studio: Editing.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll know exactly how to:

• Edit your video from scratch using CapCut

• Use the core CapCut features that save you time and make your videos pop

• Avoid the 80% of features that don’t matter (yet)

We’ll start with a quick overview of the 2 workflows—pick the one that fits how you create.

Let’s get into it.

Choose Your CapCut Editing Workflow

Before we touch the timeline, let’s clarify something:

There are two primary ways you might be building your Shorts—and they each come with different editing needs.

Workflow A: Record Yourself (Talking Head)

This is the most direct way to make Shorts.

You open CapCut, hit record, and film:

• Your face (webcam)

• Your screen (for tutorials or walkthroughs)

• Or both, picture-in-picture

After recording, your focus is:

• Adding captions, b-roll, and images

• Cleaning up mistakes and filler words

• Making it visually clean with basic transitions and music

You can go idea → filmed → edited → published without ever leaving CapCut.

Workflow B: Faceless / Assembled

This is more “drag and drop.”

You’re importing assets you’ve already created using other tools, like:

• ElevenLabs (voiceovers)

• HeyGen (avatars)

• Sora or stock b-roll (visuals)

• ChatGPT 4o image generation

• Background music or sound effects

You can also generate most of the same media directly inside CapCut, but with less control and lower quality.

Once You’ve Recorded or Imported, the editing process becomes the same. You’re lining up clips, trimming dead space, adding visuals, and packaging it up for publishing.

Now, there’s a ton that goes into editing.

But if you zoom out and focus on the core principles of video, everything becomes way easier.

Your 80/20 Shorts Editing Checklist

Shorts live and die by attention.

And we’ve already talked about how attention is earned through movement and sound.

Let’s break it down.

With video, you can create movement in 3 primary ways:

1. You physically move (gesture, lean forward, nod)

2. The camera moves (zoom, pan, crop, cut)

3. The screen changes (text pops in, image slides over, color fades)

And underneath that movement, there are 5 core editing techniques every good Short uses:

You can apply these to anything: video, text, b-roll, images, effects.

Whether you’re using CapCut or not, these concepts apply everywhere.

You can use 1 concept at a time or all 5 in one scene. This is the art of video. Now, we’re not going to cover all of video editing in this one lesson. That would take hours. But once you understand these fundamentals, you’ll start to see them in every video.. And when you see something you like, you can do a quick search to learn how to do it.

For example, when I first started using CapCut. I wanted to know how to I could speed up the editing process using CapCut’s AI features.

This video helped me a ton.👇

So, to make this easier for you…

I built a Video Editing Swipe File.

• So you don’t waste hours searching YouTube

• So you have a simple step-by-step checklist

• And so you can focus on making great videos—not figuring out where the buttons are

Check it out using the link at the end of this post.