Video content is now king on every platform. With Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok, video editing has become a skill everyone needs to learn. You used to have to pay thousands of lira for heavy programs like Adobe Premiere. Now, thanks to AI-powered tools, professional videos can be produced in minutes.
Over the past six months, we used six different video editing tools on real projects. While preparing videos for our YouTube channel, ad videos for clients and social media content, we discovered each tool's strengths and weaknesses.
CapCut: Free and Powerful
CapCut is a free video editing tool developed by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok. It works on both mobile and desktop and offers an incredibly rich feature set for beginners.
I first used CapCut for a client's Instagram Reels content. The automatic captioning feature was a lifesaver, because 85% of videos are watched on mute, and without captions engagement drops. CapCut does it in one click, and its Turkish support is quite good, too.
Its template library is also very rich. Trending effects and transitions are constantly updated. Once I had to prepare an urgent promo video for a client, and with CapCut templates I turned out a professional-looking video in 30 minutes. The client thought I'd had a production company make it.
On the downside, it's limited when it comes to advanced color correction and multi-layer editing. But it's more than enough for 90% of users.
Descript: The Text-Based Editing Revolution
Descript has created a revolution in the video editing world. You upload the video, it automatically produces a transcript, and you edit the video by editing the text. When you delete a word, that word is removed from the video too.
I was skeptical when I first heard this concept, but when I tried it my jaw dropped. We started using Descript to edit our podcast episodes. Editing a one-hour podcast episode used to take three or four hours; with Descript we finish it in one hour. Filler sounds like "um" and "uh" are automatically detected and removed with one click.
The filler word removal feature alone is worth the price of the tool. One of our speakers said "uh" an average of three times per sentence. Descript detected all of them automatically and deleted them. The result was an incredibly professional recording.
Descript's downside is that it's limited in visual effects and animation. It's excellent for text-based content and podcast editing, but it may not be enough if you want to make a cinematic video.
Runway: The Future of Video Editing with AI
Runway is a pioneer of AI-powered video editing. With its Gen-2 model, you can create video from text. But its real strength is its AI features for editing existing videos.
We used Runway's background removal feature for a product promo video. From a video shot without a green screen, it removed the background perfectly and put a studio setting in its place. This used to require After Effects and hours of masking. Runway does it automatically.
After discovering Runway, a designer friend of mine started offering video services to her clients as well. With the text-to-video feature, she can quickly prepare concept videos and get client approval. After getting approval, she moves on to the professional shoot. This process has significantly increased client satisfaction.
However, Runway's pricing is credit-based and can get expensive with heavy use. The length of the generated videos is also still limited.
Opus Clip: Short Content from Long Videos
Opus Clip is an AI tool that automatically turns long videos into short clips. It's excellent for converting your YouTube videos into TikTok and Reels formats.
When we used this tool for our YouTube channel, the results surprised us. From a 45-minute interview video, it automatically detected the 10 most engaging moments and created short videos of 30 to 60 seconds each. With its virality score, it even showed which clip had the most potential to get views.
Of course, not every clip turns out perfect. About 70% of the automatically selected clips are of genuinely usable quality. The rest need to be edited manually. Still, it saves a huge amount of time compared with cutting from scratch.
Pika and Kling AI: Text-to-Video Generation
Pika and Kling AI are two standout tools for text-to-video generation. You type a sentence and it creates a video within seconds.
To be honest, these tools aren't yet at professional production quality. But they're quite useful for social media content and concept visualization. In a client meeting, we quickly created a concept video with Pika to explain our idea, and the client was quite impressed.
Conclusion: Which Tool Is Right for You?
In our experience, choosing the right tool depends entirely on your needs:
- CapCut if you want quick content for social media
- Descript if you edit podcasts or talking-head videos
- Runway if you want to do creative projects with AI
- Opus Clip if you want to turn long videos into short content
My personal workflow goes like this: after shooting, I do the main edit in CapCut, edit podcasts in Descript and use Opus Clip to pull short content out of long YouTube videos. This combination is both fast and economical.
