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05 — CapCut vs JianYing — what's different

CapCut and JianYing are the international and Chinese-market builds of the same ByteDance product. They share ~95% of the draft format, but the differences matter when writing tooling.

Filename and path

CapCut JianYing (剪映)
Project filename draft_content.json (Windows) or draft_info.json (macOS) draft_info.json
Project dir ~/Movies/CapCut/User Data/Projects/com.lveditor.draft/<id>/ (mac) ~/Movies/JianyingPro/User Data/Projects/com.lveditor.draft/<id>/ (mac)
%LOCALAPPDATA%\CapCut\User Data\Projects\com.lveditor.draft\<id>\ (win) similar under JianyingPro\

capcut-cli auto-detects either filename when you pass the project directory.

platform.app_source

The single field that tells you which app saved the draft:

"platform": {
  "app_source": "cc",     // CapCut
  // OR
  "app_source": "lv",     // JianYing (LV = lv_editor / 剪映)
  "app_version": "5.0.0",
  "os": "mac"
}

capcut-cli reads this to pick the right enum namespace by default when listing transitions / masks / effects. The --jianying flag forces the JianYing namespace regardless of app_source.

Enum-id divergence — the big one

Most decorative resources (transitions, masks, image animations, text animations, scene effects) have different effect_id / resource_id values between CapCut and JianYing, even when the visual effect is the same.

Example: Fade In text animation.

  • CapCut: effect_id: "9094" (or whatever the current CapCut id is)
  • JianYing: effect_id: "...different..."

If you write a CapCut transition id into a JianYing draft (or vice versa), the host app will load the draft but render that transition as a no-op.

capcut-cli solves this by:

  1. Extracting both namespaces' full catalogues into src/enums.json at build time from pyJianYingDraft's Python enums.
  2. Keying every enum lookup on (slug, namespace) where namespace is capcut (default) or jianying.
  3. Slugs are human-readable (fade-in, dissolve, circle, …) and shared across namespaces where the same visual effect exists.

How to switch namespaces

Two equivalent ways:

# Per-command via flag:
capcut transition ./draft <segment-id> dissolve --jianying

# Per-draft via the saved draft's platform.app_source:
# (capcut-cli reads it automatically; the --jianying flag overrides)

The --jianying flag is threaded through every decorator command: transition, mask, text-anim, image-anim, add-effect, and enums.

JianYing slug quirks

A handful of JianYing transitions / masks have no English slug — their original Python identifiers are Chinese-language. capcut-cli enums --transitions --jianying lists them with an empty slug and a member field containing the Python name:

[ { "slug": "", "member": "_3D空间", "name": "3D Space" }, ... ]

You can still attach them by passing the member name as the slug argument:

capcut transition ./draft <id> "_3D空间" --jianying

Sticker resources

Sticker resource_ids also differ between CapCut and JianYing's library catalogues. The numbers are not transferable. If you build a sticker workflow on CapCut and want to port it to JianYing (or vice versa), you'll need to re-browse the library and capture new resource ids.

Fonts

JianYing ships a different default font catalogue (Chinese-language fonts dominant). Font fallbacks: if a CapCut draft references a font id JianYing doesn't recognise, JianYing falls back to its system default. The text renders but the design changes. Worth keeping in mind for cross-platform delivery.

Audio effects / music

Music library (music_id) and audio effects also have CapCut-vs-JianYing catalogue divergence. User-imported audio (type: "extract_music") is portable; library audio (type: "music" with a music_id) typically isn't.

What's the SAME

  • Top-level draft shape (id, name, duration, fps, canvas, tracks, materials)
  • Track and segment shapes
  • Time units (microseconds everywhere)
  • Coordinate system (-1..1 normalized for position; unitless multipliers for scale; degrees for rotation)
  • Material category names (videos, audios, texts, stickers, video_effects, material_animations, transitions, masks, canvases, etc.)
  • The text content field's JSON-in-JSON shape ({text, styles, layer_weight, effect})
  • Keyframe property types (KFTypePositionX, KFTypeAlpha, etc.)
  • Animation system shape (sticker_animation with intro / outro / combo slots)
  • The apply_target_type semantics for scene effects

capcut-cli is built to be schema-portable — the actual JSON manipulation is namespace-agnostic; only the enum lookup table changes via --jianying.

Version-within-app differences

CapCut major versions (3.x, 4.x, 5.x) have introduced minor schema additions over time:

  • New material categories (smart_crops, manual_deformations, vocal_separations)
  • New extra_info keys
  • Per-segment colour-grade fields (enable_color_curves, enable_color_wheels, etc.) added gradually

capcut-cli does not version-gate. It writes the most current shape; older CapCut versions either ignore unknown fields or silently downgrade them on save. We test against CapCut 5.x and JianYing 4.x as the reference targets.

Cross-platform editing

You can open a CapCut-saved draft in JianYing and vice versa — the file format is shared. What breaks:

  1. Decorative resources (transitions, masks, animations, stickers, filters) render as no-ops on the wrong-namespace host.
  2. Font references may fall back to system default.
  3. Library audio (music_id) loses its source.
  4. Cloud-sync features differ — CapCut Cloud and JianYing Cloud are separate accounts.

User-imported video / audio / image / text, motion keyframes, segment timing, multi-style text ranges — all portable.