Re-lay captions for a canvas

Word captions are split into pages that fit the canvas they were made on, so a narrower canvas can leave them too wide. Re-lay Captions splits them into pages again for the new width, from the words they already hold.

Menu: File ▸ Re-lay Captions for This Canvas
Agent tools: relay_captions

Re-lay Captions for This Canvas

Change the canvas size on the Document tab.
Choose File ▸ Re-lay Captions for This Canvas. It has no keyboard shortcut and no options.
If a sheet appears, read which tracks were kept as placed and why.

Frame Job looks at every track named Captions or Captions N that holds only text clips. A track whose pages are all in one of the five word styles, with the same looks, is paged again from the words its pages hold. Nothing is transcribed again, so nothing is uploaded or billed.

The whole re-lay is one undo step, Re-lay Captions.

What a re-lay keeps

Every correction you typed is kept, because the new pages are made from the words on the old ones.

Each page is paged again inside its own clip, and the new pages take the old track’s place:

A page you split, trimmed or moved keeps its words where they are.
Pages are never merged across clips. A re-lay can split a page that’s too wide for the new canvas, but a wider canvas won’t join short pages together.
Words cut off by a trim stay cut off.
The new pages go on a track with the same name, in the same place in the track stack, hidden and locked if the old one was.

The new pages are drawn fresh from the style, so any other change you made to a page goes. That includes a colour, an outline, a size, a position, or an unticked UPPERCASE.

Tracks kept as placed

A track that can’t be re-laid stays exactly as it was. A sheet after the edit names each one and why, under a first line that reads “Re-laid 2 caption tracks for this canvas.” or “No caption track was re-laid.”

Each track gets a line like this:

Caption track “Captions 2” is kept as placed: it holds a page with no word timings.

The reason	What it means
it is a matte track	The track is a matte track.
it holds a page with no word timings	It’s a Subtitles or imported track, or a page lost its timing because you changed its number of words.
it holds a page none of whose words starts inside it	A trim or split left a page with no word that begins on it.
it holds a page in a style Frame Job does not make	You changed a page’s font, or an agent changed its word style.
its pages are in more than one style	Pages on the track differ in style or looks, for example after you moved some from another track.
N captions is more than this project has room for	The new pages would take the project past its limit of 4,096 clips. The sentence says how many more would fit.

No sheet appears when every track was re-laid.

To re-wrap a Subtitles track, or a track that lost its timing, generate it again on the new canvas. See Restyle a caption track.

When it is available, and inside a nest

The item is greyed out when:

there’s no caption track it can re-lay
a sheet is open
a recording is running

So if every caption track is ruled out by a reason in the table above, other than the project’s clip limit, the item is greyed out and no sheet tells you why.

Inside a nest, it works on the nest’s tracks at the nest’s size.

File ▸ Make Vertical Version… does the same for the vertical copy. See What Make Vertical changes.

Good to know

A track with any other name isn’t looked at, and the sheet doesn’t mention it. Neither is a track that holds a clip other than text.
The item doesn’t check whether the canvas changed. Choosing it on the same canvas pages the track again, which still drops the hand changes listed in What a re-lay keeps. Undo brings them back.

With an agent

relay_captions does the same in the timeline or nest that’s open, usually after set_canvas changes the size. It takes no arguments, and its result lists the tracks it re-laid and each kept track with its reason. When nothing can be re-laid, the call fails with those reasons, so an agent can tell you why the menu item is greyed out. See relay_captions.