The timeline holds nine item types — video, audio, image, GIF, SVG, text, captions, solid color, and motion graphic — and each type exposes its own set of inspector controls; effects and transitions aren’t separate clips, they attach to the items and tracks you already have.
What can I add to the timeline?
The timeline supports nine item types: video, audio, image, GIF, SVG, text, captions, solid, and motion-graphic. Effects and transitions aren’t standalone clips — an effect attaches to a target clip or to a whole track (optionally scoped to a time range), and a transition connects one outgoing and one incoming clip with its own frame-based duration and an on/off toggle.
What can I do with a clip’s playback speed?
Video, audio, and GIF clips have a Speed slider running from 0.25x to 5x in 0.05 steps, shown as a value like “1.00x”. Image, SVG, text, captions, solid, and motion-graphic items don’t have a speed control.
What visual controls does an item have?
Visual items have a free-form Rotation control with no minimum or maximum, and a six-button Alignment control for left/center/right and top/middle/bottom placement on the canvas. Cropping (the toolbar’s Crop button) works on video, image, GIF, and SVG items only — not audio, captions, motion-graphic, solid, or text. Video, image, GIF, SVG, and solid items also have a Corner radius control starting at 0 with no upper limit. Every clip carries independent fade handles you drag directly on the timeline: video clips have both a visual fade and an audio fade, audio clips have an audio-only fade, and other visual items have a visual-only fade.
What text and caption styling is available?
Text items support font family, weight, size, fill color, alignment, LTR/RTL direction, letter spacing, line height, stroke width and color, and an optional background pill with its own color, padding, and corner radius. Font size runs from 1 to 500; line height from 0.5 to 5 in 0.1 steps; letter spacing from -10 to 50 in 0.2 steps.
Captions ship with 21 named style presets (default “Plain”) plus their own controls: font size from 1% to 15% of the frame height (default 4%), a 1-line or 2-line wrap limit, an Auto or Custom (minimum 5 characters) per-line character cap, and a 3x3 title-safe position grid. The styling panel also covers stroke, background, shadow, line height, letter spacing, capitalization, a “Show punctuation” toggle, text alignment, and text direction. Active-word (“karaoke”) highlighting has a Word/Character-or-Line unit, a Text-or-Block type, and a color — it defaults to word-level for most languages and off for CJK captions — with an entrance animation of None, Fade, Slide, or Bounce.
What fonts can I use?
The font picker draws from all 1,803 Google Fonts plus 12 bundled custom fonts built for Chinese type (including Smiley Sans and HarmonyOS Sans), searchable by their Chinese names. With no search typed, it shows the top 250 Google fonts plus the 12 custom fonts; searching matches the full 1,803-font catalog.
What effects, LUTs, and transitions can I apply?
ChatCut ships nine built-in visual effects — Rectangle Mask, Circle Mask, Local Mosaic, Magnifying Glass, Tilt-Shift, CRT Retro, ASCII Rain, Camera Shake, and Black Overlay (Screen) — plus a track-bound Zoom effect with 1x-4x magnification, an X/Y focal point, four styles (Punch, In & Out, Slow Push, Instant), Auto or Manual focal mode, and 0-60-frame ease in/out; the library also offers those same four zoom moves as one-click presets. Two built-in LUTs are included — Sony S-Log3 → s709 and Canon Log 3 → BT.709 — and you can upload your own .cube LUT file. There are 12 built-in video transitions (Anticipation Zoom, Clean Line Wipe, Cross Dissolve, Dip to Black, Flash, Impact Shake, Luma Blend, Organic Light Dissolve, Page Curl, Rack Focus, Soft Wipe, Whip Pan) plus an Audio Cross Fade transition built for audio-only cuts. Right-clicking a cut offers “Add transition” (Cross Dissolve for video, Cross Fade for audio-only) with “Video only” and “Audio only” refinements; it greys out with a reason shown when the clips don’t have enough spare footage to overlap.
Effects can be dropped onto a single clip or onto an entire video track, where they become a track-bound block — an adjustment-style drop defaults to 3 seconds of coverage. The inspector’s effect chain groups a clip’s applied effects into Effect, LUT, and Mask sections, each with its own on/off switch, delete button, and editable properties; it reads “No effects applied” when a clip has none.
What audio-specific controls are there?
Audio and video clips have a volume line you drag directly on the clip, ranging from -60 dB to +20 dB with 0 dB (unity gain) at the center. Both also have an “AI Voice Isolation” toolbar button (toggle it off with “Restore original audio”) and a strength slider from 0 to 100, defaulting to 100. Automatic ducking is set per track: a track-header control cycles a track’s role through anchor, follower, and off, and follower tracks dip under anchor audio with the resulting duck curve drawn on the follower clips. Tracks are audio or video type and can each be hidden, locked, muted, and renamed. A built-in Sound Effects library panel has search, a Popular filter, and four browse groups — Transition & Emphasis, Reaction & Mood, UI & Motion Feedback, and Device & Texture — covering categories like Whoosh, Riser, Impact Boom, and Camera Shutter.
What else can I add to a project?
Solid items are colored rectangle layers with a fill color picker plus opacity, corner radius, rotation, alignment, dimensions, and fade in/out. Motion-graphic items are code-based graphics whose asset-defined properties — numbers, booleans, dropdowns, images, videos — are editable in the inspector. Timeline markers carry a name, note, duration range, and one of eight colors: blue, cyan, fuchsia, green, pink, purple, red, or yellow. Selecting 2 or more video or audio clips that are all at 1x playback speed unlocks “AI multicam sync” from the right-click menu. All of these live in the library panel alongside Sound Effects, Transitions, Effects, Zoom, LUTs, and Audio FX — double-click a preset to apply it at the playhead, or drag it onto the timeline.
See also: How is the ChatCut editor laid out, What are ChatCut’s keyboard shortcuts, How do I edit video by editing the transcript, What can I upload to ChatCut — formats, sizes, and limits.
Can I change clip speed in ChatCut?
Yes — select a single video, audio, or GIF clip and drag the Speed slider in the inspector to set playback rate anywhere from 0.25x to 5x, adjustable in 0.05x steps (shown as a value like “1.00x”). The Speed control only appears when exactly one speedable clip is selected; it isn’t available for images, text, captions, or other non-time-based item types.
See also: How is the ChatCut editor laid out.
Can I customize how captions look?
Yes — captions have a full styling panel covering presets, size, position, color, and text effects. ChatCut ships 21 named caption presets (default is “Plain”; others include Netflix, TikTok Pop, Bubble Pop, and Bold Outline).
Font size is a slider from 1% to 15% of the frame height, default 4%. Position snaps to a 3x3 title-safe grid (left/center/right × top/middle/bottom). The panel also covers text stroke, background, shadow, line height, letter spacing, capitalization, a “Show punctuation” toggle, alignment, and text direction. Captions wrap to 1 or 2 lines, and max characters per line is Auto by default or a custom number (minimum 5).
The active-word highlight has its own controls: Unit (Word or Line), Type (Text or Block) plus a color, entrance Motion (None, Fade, Slide, or Bounce), and Pacing (Auto, Phrase, Word, or Custom) for how much text sits on one caption card at a time.
See also: How do I edit video by editing the transcript.
What effects and transitions does ChatCut have?
ChatCut ships nine built-in visual effects, two built-in LUTs, a dedicated Zoom effect, and 12 named video transitions plus an Audio Cross Fade transition, all combined through each clip’s effect chain in the inspector.
The nine effects: Rectangle Mask, Circle Mask, Local Mosaic, Magnifying Glass, Tilt-Shift, CRT Retro, ASCII Rain, Camera Shake, and Black Overlay (Screen). Two built-in LUTs — Sony S-Log3 → s709 and Canon Log 3 → BT.709 — are included, plus custom .cube LUT upload. Zoom adds four presets — Punch, In & Out, Slow Push, Instant — with manual magnification and focal-point controls.
The 12 video transitions: Anticipation Zoom, Clean Line Wipe, Cross Dissolve, Dip to Black, Flash, Impact Shake, Luma Blend, Organic Light Dissolve, Page Curl, Rack Focus, Soft Wipe, and Whip Pan. Audio Cross Fade crossfades the outgoing and incoming audio across a cut instead. Right-click a cut for “Add transition”, or drag any of these in from the library panel. The inspector’s effect chain groups applied effects into Effect, LUT, and Mask sections, each with its own on/off switch.
See also: How is the ChatCut editor laid out.