Edit captions

A caption is an ordinary text clip, so you edit it the way you edit any text clip. The one thing to watch is word captions. Each of their clips is a page of words, with every word timed to the speech. Most edits keep that timing, and a few drop it.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Text sectionsDouble-click a page on the canvasThe timeline
Agent tools: set_text

Edit captions in the Text sections

Select a caption and open the Clip tab. The Text sections are Content, Font, Style, Outline, Backdrop, Box, Reveal and Presets, and they work as they do for any text clip.

Select several captions to change them together. That’s the quick way to set a font or a colour across a whole run. Take care with Content, though: what you type there replaces the text of every selected caption.

To move a caption on the screen, drag it on the canvas or use the Transform section. To change when it shows, use the timeline, as below. The Presets buttons set position as well as look.

Change the words on a page

Type in the Content box, or double-click the page on the canvas and type there. The same rule holds in both places:

You change	What happens to the timing
The text, keeping the same number of words	Every word keeps its timing. Fixing a misheard word is safe.
The number of words	The page loses its timing and shows plainly, with no word-by-word effect.

Words are counted by the spaces between them, so turning “gonna” into “going to” changes the count.

A page that has lost its timing says Not timed — regenerate to time it again in the Content section. To time it again, generate the captions again. The new pages come from the speech, not from the old track, so your corrections, splits, trims and hand styling on that track go too.

Case on a word page

The capitals on a word caption come from its style, through the UPPERCASE box in the Style section. Untick it to show a page as written.

Case is applied when the page is drawn, so the Content box always shows the words as written, however the page looks. Changing case never drops the word timing.

Trimming, splitting and moving a page

Trim, split and drag a page on the timeline with the usual tools. All three are safe for word timing:

Trim changes when the page is on screen. Each word stays on the speech it times, and the page’s text doesn’t change.
Split gives you two clips that play as the one page did. Both keep the page’s words, each word still on its speech.
Dragging a page moves its words with it, so they stay in step with the page, not with the speech under it.

Reveals do not apply to a timed page

The text reveals (Typewriter, Word Fade and Line Rise) don’t work on a word caption page. The rows in the Reveal section are greyed, and the section says Word style wins; the reveal does not apply.

That’s true of any page with a word style, including one that has lost its timing.

Change a page’s word style

No inspector section sets a word style’s highlight colour, pop scale or pill colour. To change them, generate the captions again with a different style, or ask an agent.

Newly revealed speech stays uncaptioned

When a speed-up or a ramp makes a clip play further into its file, the new part gets no captions until you choose File ▸ Generate Captions… again. Captions follow a speed change explains how the captions you already have move.

Word timings for agents

An agent can do two things here that the inspector can’t: rewrite a page’s word timings, and change its word style, both with set_text. Frame Job won’t take a set of timings that doesn’t have exactly one timing for each word of the page, so a change to the number of words has to clear the timings in the same call. Word timings can’t be animated with an action. See Word timings and word style.

Good to know

With an action selected on a page, a Content edit goes to that action and the page keeps its timing. Where the action’s text has a different number of words from the page, the page shows plainly.
A split page is two text clips, so an exported caption file has two cues with the same words.
Frame Job won’t run Retime Range over a caption page with timed words. Move the range off the page first.