The research
- CapCut is the best action-cam editing app
- GoPro and Insta360’s apps are perfect for beginners
- What about iMovie and YouTube Create?
- A few editing tips
- Next steps
CapCut is the best action-cam editing app
Our pick
CapCut
Best third-party video-editing app
This app is free and easy to use, and it has nearly every feature you need in a mobile video editor. You can even transfer in-process edits to the desktop version.
Buying Options
CapCut (iOS, Android, Windows) is one of the best-reviewed editing apps, and it’s easy to see why. It just works. It’s intuitive, it has lots of useful features, and best of all, it’s totally free.
This app can’t stand alone: You still need your camera’s native app to move clips from your camera to your phone. But it offers the most complete set of editing features available in a free app, plus deep integration with TikTok (the apps are made by the same company, ByteDance). It also has AI features, including one called AutoCut that automatically creates a video from clips, plus text-to-image generation.
CapCut makes it easy to add the clips you want, trim them, adjust their colors and contrast, insert transitions, and quickly produce a polished, professional-looking video. It offers templates that give you a framework to start a video, as well. You can add captions, effects, and filters, and you can output videos at up to 4K resolution.
CapCut’s auto-generated videos have a distinct TikTok-style look, though you can opt for landscape orientation, if you prefer.
It’s an in-depth video editor, which means newcomers may take longer to get comfortable, but taking the time pays off in the long run with the app’s additional depth. For even more elaborate edits, CapCut’s mobile app can transfer editing projects to the desktop version.
Like most free apps, it occasionally shows you ads. We didn’t find them obtrusive, but CapCut may add more ads with a future update. If the ads bother you, consider the Insta360 app (discussed below), which is a free alternative with minimal ads that are only for that company. Another way to avoid ads is to upgrade CapCut to the paid Pro version, which also lets you edit videos longer than 15 minutes and includes a lot of templates, transitions, AI features, and cloud storage. The Pro version is $10 per month, however. Most people should be fine with the remarkably robust free version and its occasional ads.
Additional tips:
- CapCut adds a logo at the end of videos, but you can disable that in the settings under “Add default ending.”
- It gives you the option to export to TikTok to remove the CapCut watermark. If you select this option, it removes the watermark from the current video and all future ones, even if you don’t have TikTok installed. This workaround may change or stop working in the future.
- Make sure to select “HD” when selecting clips to edit, and verify that the resolution, frame rate, and “Code rate” (aka bit rate) are set to your preferences before exporting. Higher resolutions and bit rates take longer to export but ensure better picture quality.
- Some of the music in the app is available only if you also export to TikTok, but you can always add music later in your chosen social media app.
GoPro and Insta360’s apps are perfect for beginners
If you have a camera from GoPro or Insta360, it’s worthwhile to spend some time getting to know the respective official app. For one thing, you need to use that app to move clips to your phone. And while CapCut and other third-party editing apps have more options, beginners can get most of what they need from these official apps alone.
Our pick
GoPro Quik
Best for GoPro owners and beginners
This app lets you easily create videos, with optional cloud uploads and automatic editing (albeit at the cost of an annual subscription).
Buying Options
$953 from Google Play
GoPro Quik (Mac and iOS and Android; Windows version coming later in 2024) lets you control GoPro cameras remotely and also includes a solid editing suite. Compared with more robust editors like CapCut, Quik is best for beginners who want a little hand-holding as they learn the ins and outs of the editing process.
Quik’s most useful feature is its ability to automatically upload videos to the GoPro cloud, which then edits them together into a single highlight video with music and transitions that it delivers to you ready for posting. You need a yearly subscription to access this feature, but it also gives you unlimited storage for footage that you capture on your GoPro camera.
GoPro Quik produces generally good-looking automatically edited videos, but in our testing it often inserted clips in the wrong orientation, as in this video.
This automatic editing works as expected, in that you get a single video containing all of a day’s footage in an almost entirely hands-off manner. However, the result is usually more of a place to start your own editing process than a polished, finished product.
For instance, Quik has trouble recognizing upside-down footage, and it can often highlight and linger on boring shots for an inexplicably long time. Fortunately, you can easily go into the video and adjust the individual clips, the length of the overall video, the music, and so on.
Additional tips:
- Once you download the footage from your camera into the app, no matter what you do you’ll need to save it again to your phone’s picture gallery in order to find it. Otherwise it stays “stuck” in the app.
- Sometimes the automatic video takes a while to come back from the cloud. If you don’t want to wait, you can manually select clips and have the app create a video from those. This method prevents you from doing anything else with your phone for the duration of the processing, however.
- When manually editing your video, you can also add any other images or videos from your phone not recorded with the GoPro camera.
Our pick
Insta360
Best for Insta360 owners and people who want to edit 360 video
This robust and surprisingly elaborate video editor has more depth than GoPro Quik and also offers some AI-enhanced features, including automatic edits. But it takes some time to master.
Buying Options
Insta360’s app (iOS, Android) has a lot more going on than GoPro Quik—visually, at least—but the core features, including remote camera control and video editing, with optional automatic video generation, are very similar. The editing tools are more robust than Quik’s, offering more control over your videos with a layout similar to CapCut’s.
If Quik is for beginners looking for a bit of help as they learn, Insta360’s app is a great middle ground between that and CapCut. If you're already familiar with mobile video editing, you can find just about every feature you want here, minus some of the more advanced AI features and TikTok integration from CapCut. But Insta360’s app also provides some free features, such as a variety of transitions between video clips, that CapCut gives you only in its paid Pro version.
If you’re editing 360 footage, you need to use the Insta360 app to make shareable clips, even if you want to send it to CapCut later on. Editing 360 video takes a few extra steps compared with “normal” video, but the app does a great job of making the process fairly straightforward.
Insta360’s app can create “AI”-generated auto-cuts that splice together clips with a vibe-appropriate soundtrack. In general, we found that they came out slightly better than GoPro Quik’s comparable automatic edits.
The app has an on-device “AI” auto editor that works with both 360 and regular content, though it tends to be a little swoopy for my tastes with 360 clips (by default, the camera angle moves a lot, though you can adjust it). When it comes to non-360 footage, I’ve gotten better automatic results from Insta360’s app than GoPro’s cloud editor, but in both cases some additional manual tweaking of the results yields better videos overall.
Insta360’s biggest advantage over GoPro Quik is its use of proxy files—lower-resolution duplicate files that allow for fast editing even on older, slower phones. Insta360 then uses the full-resolution files to create the final video. The process is generally smooth—and it’s necessary since videos from the Insta360 X4 and AcePro cameras can be up to 8K resolution, which can bog down even the fastest phones.
Additional tips:
- Editing 360 videos takes some practice. In addition to handling all the normal video editing (cuts, speed, and so on), you also need to determine the direction and movement of the virtual camera. The Insta360 app offers suggestions, but figuring it out yourself is worth the time and effort.
- Regular photos and videos save to your phone’s gallery automatically, but 360 clips need to be edited in some way first.
- Once you’ve created your video, which can include non-Insta360 clips and photos, you need to export it. Depending on your phone, this process can take a few minutes, especially at higher resolutions and quality. The same is true of all video-editing apps, though GoPro can do some editing in the cloud and allow you to use your phone for something else.
- Insta360’s app includes a lot of transitions (stylistic ways to cut between video clips) that other editors like CapCut include only in their expensive paid options. Transitions can make a video far more interesting and professional-looking.
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What about iMovie and YouTube Create?
Apple’s iMovie (available only for Apple devices) is extremely user-friendly but basic. That said, if you have an iOS device or a Mac, it’s a great place to start.
Google’s YouTube Create (Android, iOS later in 2024) occupies the Goldilocks zone, as it’s more elaborate than iMovie but not as complex as CapCut. It offers a relatively quick way to edit a professional-looking video, including picture adjustments, speed adjustments, image and video overlays, music, sound effects, and more—though it does have a bit of a learning curve in comparison with simpler apps.
We also checked out several other popular options, but we didn’t find them better than CapCut, GoPro Quik, or Insta360. For instance, Adobe Premiere Rush (iOS, Android) is relatively cumbersome to use and recently removed its useful desktop Premiere Pro syncing feature. Adobe Express (iOS, Android) seems more aimed toward brands and marketers than individuals.
A few editing tips
There’s no such thing as learning too much about editing. If you decide that you’re serious about it, you can find endless videos and books about the topic. The legendary editor Walter Murch (whose resume includes Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation) wrote a great one. He’s 81 and still at it.
But here are a few suggestions to keep in mind as you’re getting started:
- Respect your audience’s time. It was the great bard William Shakespeare who said: “When it comes to editing video, brevity is the soul of wit.” There are lots of ways to edit, but if you’re just starting out, it’s rarely a bad choice to keep things short and to the point.
- Cut to the beat. When possible, make edits to the beat of your chosen music, as in this brilliant example (video). Not every beat needs a new shot, but this is a good foundation.
- Transitions are key. Ideally, when you’re shooting, have some ideas about how to transition from one shot or scene to another. Most of the apps we’ve described above, especially CapCut and Insta360, include stylistic ways to transition between clips that really elevate a video.
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Next steps
Once you start to get the hang of mobile editing apps, consider a move to desktop editing software. These more powerful editing suites offer significantly more creative freedom, so you’ll have an easier time accomplishing more complex and precise edits. Finished videos will render much more quickly, too. Their main downside in comparison with mobile apps is that you’ll need to transfer files back and forth between your phone and computer before posting them online.
One good starter desktop editing suite is DaVinci Resolve, which is free. Other, paid options such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer can be quite expensive but are more common in the professional world.
This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.
