Looks for word captions

Looks add movement to a word style’s pages: a pill that slides between words, a word that fills as it’s said, and a page that dims when nobody’s talking.

Menu: File ▸ Generate Captions…
Where: The Generate Captions sheet, under Style:
Agent tools: transcribeset_text

Three looks for word captions

Choose File ▸ Generate Captions…, and set Language:, Engine: and From: as Generate Captions explains.
Set Style: to a word style.
Tick the looks you want under the Style: pop-up.
Choose Generate.

Each look works with some styles and not others:

Look	Highlight	Pill	Karaoke	Build	One Word
Slide the pill		Yes
Fill words as spoken	Yes		Yes	Yes
Dim in pauses	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

A box that doesn’t apply to the chosen style is greyed out and does nothing, but it keeps its tick for when you switch back. With Subtitles chosen, all three are greyed out.

Each box is off until you tick it, and the sheet remembers each one between runs.

A look changes how a word is drawn, never a letter or the size of the page. Ticking one doesn’t change where pages break.

Looks are set when the captions are generated, like the style. To change them on a placed track, generate again with Replace.

Slide the pill

The pill slides from the previous word to the one being said, instead of jumping. The slide takes 0.2 s, or less when the next word starts sooner, so the pill has always arrived before it has to leave. The first word on a page has nothing to slide from, so the pill starts there.

This works with Pill, the only style that has one.

Fill words as spoken

The word being said fills from left to right as it’s spoken. The fill runs from the word’s start to its end, and takes 0.6 s at most, so a long word finishes filling before it’s finished being said.

Style	The part already said	The rest of the word
Highlight	Yellow	White
Karaoke	Yellow	White at 55% opacity
Build	Yellow	Not drawn yet

Pill and One Word can’t use this look, because their spoken word is the same colour on both sides of the fill.

Dim in pauses

The page fades to half opacity during a pause of 0.25 s or more, then comes back before the next word. Each fade takes 0.1 s, and the words and the pill fade together. It works with all five word styles.

The page also dims at either end of a caption, when the wait there is 0.25 s or more:

before the first word. The page opens dim, with no fade.
after the last word, until the caption ends.

A pause of 0.25 s also ends a page, so on a generated track you’ll mostly see the dim at the end of a page, after its last word.

With On this Mac chosen and a word style selected, a note under the boxes reads “On-device words rarely carry a pause; this shows mostly with AssemblyAI.”

The sheet’s preview doesn’t show this look.

Word colours

The inspector has no section for a page’s word colours, pop size or pill. Nothing in the Clip tab changes the yellow, the violet or how far the word pops.

To change them, generate again with a different style, or have an agent do it.

The Color row under Text ▸ Style still works on the words drawn in the text’s own colour. That’s the white words in Highlight and Build, and every word in Pill and One Word. It leaves the yellow alone, and it changes nothing in Karaoke, which sets all its own colours.

With an agent

An agent can do two things here that the sheet can’t.

It can change a placed page’s word style with set_text. That covers highlighting or building word by word, the colours of the spoken word and of the words before and after it, a pop from 100% to 150%, the pill’s colour, padding and corners, whether the pill slides, whether the word fills, and how far the page dims, from none to fully invisible. The sheet’s dim is always half. A page changed this way is no longer one of the styles Frame Job makes, so Re-lay Captions keeps its track as placed. See Word style.

It can also ask for looks with transcribe, through slide, fill and dim, but each one is off unless it asks, never what the sheet last chose. Frame Job won’t add a look to a style it wouldn’t show on, or to captions it isn’t placing. When it gives any of the three and the captions are placed, the result lists the looks that were on. See Caption looks.