Captions
Pick a caption style, tune its placement and timing, set it per scene or per project, and export subtitles.
Captions are animated, word-timed text burned into your video. Typecut times them from the voiceover's word timings, so they follow the speech.
Preview the styles
Open Captions from the dashboard to browse every caption style. Hover a card to preview it. Pick one and choose to use it in a new project, and the wizard starts with that style.
Turn captions on and pick a style
Captions can be set at three levels. Each level overrides the one above it.
- Workspace. In workspace settings, open Captions. Default Captions sets whether new projects start with captions, and which style they inherit.
- Project. In the editor, open Project settings… and go to the Captions tab. The switch Captions on by default turns them on for every scene. Style shows a live preview of each style with a demo line.
- Scene. Any scene can switch captions off or use its own style.
If captions are off for the project, they stay off for every scene unless a scene turns them on.
You can also ask the Director to set the caption default, including on or off, style, colour scheme, alignment and size.
Adjust placement
In the project's Captions tab, Placement works the same for a 9:16 and a 16:9 video, because it is set in percentages.
- Anchor. A nine-point grid: top, centre or bottom, and left, centre or right.
- Nudge. Move the captions a little left or right (X) and up or down (Y).
- Size. The text size.
- Width. How wide the caption block can get.
Reset returns placement to the style's own values. It shows once you change something. Until then, the section is marked inherited.
Some styles centre themselves. A hero style stays centred, and nudge and size still apply.
Choose how text is grouped
Chunking controls how the transcript splits into caption groups:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Phrase | Breaks on pauses, commas and sentence ends. Recommended. |
| Sentence | Breaks only on periods, exclamation marks and question marks. |
| Word | One word at a time, for hero-style captions. |
| Fixed | Always the same number of words. A Words per chunk slider sets it, from 1 to 8. |
Fine-tune colour and motion
Colours, motion and boxes are edited on the canvas with the Captions tool, where the live scene and theme sit next to the controls. The tool is in the classic editor. To open it, choose Back to the current editor from the menu.
In the Captions tool:
- This scene and Global switch what you are editing. Global is the project default. This scene changes only that scene. A scene that has its own settings shows Reset to global.
- Colours chooses Style, which uses the caption style's own colours, or Theme, which matches the project theme's colours and fonts. It shows only when the scene has a theme. See Themes.
- Motion adds continuous movement to the whole caption: still, shake, bounce, pulse, wobble or float.
- Text, Spoken word and Emphasis let you change the look of every word, the word being said, and the words picked out as key, such as numbers, capitals and sentence ends.
- Reset this style drops your manual colour and font picks for that style.
Export subtitles
You can download captions as a subtitle file. This is free and does not re-render the video, because it uses the timings your voiceover already has.
- Open the export dialog, for example with Render to MP4… in the editor menu.
- Open the Text tab.
- Under Subtitles, choose SRT or VTT.
- Click Download.
The file is split the same way as your burned-in captions. Use it for YouTube, Vimeo or a player of your own.
The Timeline tab of the export dialog also includes a subtitles.srt file in its package. In that package the scene clips are clean, with captions not burned in.
Next: Transitions and camera