Split a long recording into takes before importing into CapCut

CapCut is great at assembling a video from clips. It is much less pleasant at hunting through one enormous recording for the good takes. The fix is to do the splitting before CapCut, so what you import is already a folder of clean, named files.

The problem with importing the whole recording

Slow scrubbing. A 30-minute 4K file makes CapCut's timeline sluggish, especially on a phone or a laptop without a fast GPU.
One long clip to chop. Every take needs a split at both ends inside CapCut, and the discarded parts sit on the timeline until you delete them.
No names. Eight pieces of the same file all look alike in the media panel. Which one was the good hook?
Re-doing it per project. Want to reuse take 3 next week? Import the 30-minute file again and find it again.

The workflow that works

Split the recording once in ClipScissor: drop in the MOV or MP4, press S at the end of each take, delete the bad ones, and give each clip a name. Export the ZIP. This takes a few minutes and the clips are lossless copies of the original.
Unzip into a folder for the shoot. The files are numbered (03-product demo.mp4), so they stay in shooting order however you sort them.
Import into CapCut only the takes you want for this video. Each one is its own clip in the media panel with a readable name.
Edit as usual. Trim the first second of lead-in on each clip if you want (see below), add captions, music and transitions, and export from CapCut once.

About that second of lead-in

Clips split without re-encoding start on a keyframe, which on phone footage is typically up to a second before the exact point you cut. It is deliberate: starting early means nothing you wanted is ever lost. In CapCut, drag the clip's left edge to trim it, which is frame-accurate. If you want the split itself to be exact, drag the start handle in ClipScissor and it snaps to keyframes. The details are in how lossless cutting works.

Phone footage notes

iPhone HEVC (.MOV) is fine. The clips stay HEVC in a MOV container, exactly as recorded, and CapCut imports them like any camera file. If you have "Most Compatible" set in the Camera settings, the files are H.264 MP4 instead; that works too.
Vertical stays vertical. Rotation metadata is preserved, so 9:16 recordings import upright.
Big files are fine. ClipScissor reads the file in small pieces, so multi-gigabyte recordings work on an ordinary laptop. A ZIP made in the browser is limited to 4 GB; above that it downloads the clips one by one instead.
Do it on the computer. ClipScissor works on a phone, but a mouse and a wide timeline make finding cuts much faster. AirDrop or cable-copy the recording, split it, then send the clips wherever CapCut is.

Does this work with other editors?

Yes. The clips are ordinary MP4 or MOV files, so the same folder of takes imports into Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, iMovie and InShot without conversion.

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