CapCut keeps every draft, and drafts hold copies of your footage

Editors that came from phones behave differently from desktop ones: instead of referencing your footage where it sits, they copy it into the project so the edit is self contained. That is convenient, and it means every draft holds a full copy of everything in it.

Where drafts live

du -sh ~/Movies/CapCut ~/Library/Application\ Support/CapCut \
  ~/Library/Containers/*capcut* 2>/dev/null | sort -h
du -sh ~/Movies/*/[Dd]raft* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail

Why a draft is larger than the export

• Imported copies. Your source clips, copied in full.
• Generated proxies. Lower resolution versions for smooth editing.
• Cached effects. Rendered previews of transitions and filters.
• Autosave versions. Several states of the same project.

An export is a single compressed video. The draft that produced it can easily be ten times the size, which is why deleting drafts after exporting is the whole of the cleanup for this category.

Deleting a draft safely

1. Export the finished video and check it plays.
2. Copy the export somewhere it will be kept.
3. Delete the draft inside the app rather than in Finder, so its index stays consistent.
4. Empty the Trash, since the draft may be large enough to matter immediately.

Keeping the originals somewhere else

If the app copied your footage in, the originals may still be on a phone or a camera card, or they may not. Before deleting drafts in bulk it is worth confirming there is a copy of the source material outside the editor, which is the same rule as any video project.