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Unfinished pan — the cut-mid-motion epilogue trick

A pan that would finish, but the cut hits before it does. The viewer's eye is still moving when the next shot arrives — the frame feels alive instead of resolved. This recipe writes the keyframes directly into draft_info.json for one segment.

Chinese translation pending — see README.zh-CN.md at the repo root.

What it does

Uniform 1.2 scale (creates pan headroom — no zoom), PositionX interpolated linearly from 0 to ±0.13020833 over slot / 0.607 seconds. Because the keyframe range is longer than the segment, the pan is only ~60% complete when the cut lands. That's the whole trick.

Direction PositionX end
left -0.13020833
right +0.13020833

The amplitude is 250 / 1920 — a 1080p-aware fraction. Position units in CapCut's draft schema are normalized, so this matches a 250-pixel pan on a 1920-wide frame.

When to use

Closing / epilogue / payoff stills in the final act. A "we're still moving" feeling on a single image, right before the end card.

Bad fits:

  • Hooks (the audience hasn't earned a slow beat yet).
  • Fast-cut sequences (anything under ~2s — the motion never reads).
  • Shots where the image's own action is the focus (faces, gestures, motion within the frame).

Prerequisites

  • A CapCut project with at least one video segment.
  • Python 3.9+. No external deps.

Run it

# pan left on an epilogue still at 12:34
python3 scripts/apply-pan.py \
  "$HOME/Movies/CapCut/User Data/Projects/com.lveditor.draft/MyProject" \
  --at "12:34" --direction left

# pan right on the final wide
python3 scripts/apply-pan.py \
  "$HOME/Movies/CapCut/User Data/Projects/com.lveditor.draft/MyProject" \
  --material-name "epilogue-wide.jpg" --direction right

Three ways to identify the target segment — any one is enough:

  • --segment <id>
  • --at "M:SS"
  • --material-name <substring>

Then close + reopen CapCut to load the new keyframes.

What the script writes

For a slot of duration D seconds, with PAN_PCT = 0.607:

"common_keyframes": [
  { "property_type": "KFTypePositionX",
    "keyframe_list": [
      { "time_offset": 0,                              "values": [ 0.0] },
      { "time_offset": (D / 0.607) * 1_000_000,        "values": [-0.1302] }   // direction=left
    ] },
  // PositionY locked at 0, ScaleX locked at 1.2, Rotation locked at 0
]

The keyframe range exceeds the segment duration on purpose — that's what creates the "still moving when we cut" feel.

Don'ts

  • Don't combine with the zoom recipe on the same segment. Pick one motion.
  • Don't use as the default Ken Burns. Use zoom for body shots; reserve this for the last 1–2 stills of the video.

A .before-pan backup of draft_info.json is written next to the original. Pass --no-backup to skip.