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When TikTok shut down over the weekend, its sister app CapCut also went down – revealing how content creators across platforms have come to depend on ByteDance’s software to edit their videos. After CapCut’s return, creators are torn between whether to continue using the app or explore alternatives before it potentially disappears for good.
Professional wrestling YouTuber and streamer on Twitch MinniePortable believes that CapCut is one of the best video editing options available for content creators and pays $9.99 per month to use the premium version of the app to edit videos for YouTube and Instagram. When it went down over the weekend, she experimented with alternatives, but found that none of them worked that well for her.
“I was looking for something similar and people on Twitter recommended a few others. One of them was Filmora, which was good editing software,” said MinniePortable, who asked that her real name be withheld. “But when I tried to export it, it said ‘export with a watermark or pay $50 a year to export’.” I don’t make that $50 a year without a watermark, so I stopped trying to edit and hoped CapCut would come back.”
While there are other free editing apps available, such as Filmora and DaVinci Resolve, the creators of Digiday said CapCut offers some features that otherwise only exist on paid premium video software, such as powerful background noise reduction tools and a lack of watermarks. Thanks in part to these features, CapCut is one of the most popular video editing apps on the market. According to data from the Mobile Market Data Platform, the app has been downloaded more than a billion times in the Google Play Store alone AndroidRank. For creators invested in the CapCut outage, the app’s strengths outweigh the potential risks of its departure.
“It works very well with the touch screen and I’m practiced at it,” said YouTube creator Seth.Seth the NerferBeavers, who said he exclusively uses CapCut to edit his videos. “So now I have to learn a new editing program. I’ve tried other editing software and you have to pay to remove the watermarks, otherwise they don’t have as many features as iMovie.”
Agencies heard the same from creators, many of whom said they rely on CapCut for video editing versus using the social platform’s built-in editing tools.
“CapCut also took longer to revert than TikTok, so while creators could repost on TikTok, they were without their editing app,” said Ali Grant, co-director of The Digital Department.
Not all creators are equally concerned about the potential end of CapCut. Video creator Gianna Christine told Digiday that while she sometimes uses CapCut for simpler edits, she works with a wide variety of software and prefers to use other options for more detailed videos, whether for TikTok or other platforms.
“I use Final Cut for more intensive editing, so I use a mix of everything,” she said. “I was still able to edit my content without CapCut, but it was nice to see it back as well.”
One alternative video editing app on the horizon is Meta’s Edits, a homegrown competitor to CapCut the company announced January 19. Scheduled for release on March 13, the app is now available for free pre-order on Apple App Store. It promises to offer many of the same standard video editing tools as CapCut, as well as features such as a better video camera and data statistics for videos published on Instagram. However, for creators burned by the CapCut outage, the Meta offering could simply represent another tool that could sometimes be shut down at the whim of its owners, as was the case with Meta Spark Augmented Reality Platformwhich the company terminated on January 14.
Despite Meta’s efforts to offer an alternative to CapCut, some observers are skeptical that CapCut’s temporary outage means creators will embrace Meta’s editing capabilities.
“We don’t expect many people to flock to the newly introduced Meta edits,” said Amy Cotteleer, partner and director of experience at creative agency Duncan Channon.