Add Captions to a Video Without Opening the Timeline

Sometimes you need one captioned file and you need it now. The Quick tools row on the Projects page handles that job: drop in a video, choose a style and get the captioned video back as a download.

Run the Add captions tool

1. Open the Projects page. The Quick tools row sits above your projects. It shows when you are at the top level, outside a folder.
2. Click Add captions, described on its card as transcribe and burn in a style.
3. Drop a video onto the dialog, or click Choose a file. The dialog accepts video files.
4. Choose a Caption style. Clean is selected to begin with.
5. Click Run.

The dialog shows each stage as it goes: uploading, transcribing, then rendering with a percentage. Keep it open. When the render finishes, the download starts on its own and the dialog says so.

What happens behind the scenes

DepCut creates a project from your file, transcribes the speech, applies the style you picked and renders the video through the same export used in the editor, using the Original setting that matches your source. The spoken language is detected automatically. Transcription spends account credits, the same as Generate subtitles in the editor.

The captions are burned into the downloaded video, so they show on every player and every platform.

Fine-tune the result

The dialog has no editing step, so watch the downloaded file once. If a name or a number is wrong, open the project that the run left in your list, correct the caption in the Subtitles panel and export again. The same project is where you can change the style, set a font, move the captions or add a second language.

Clear audio gives the transcriber its best chance. A video with a loud music bed or several people talking over each other is worth a proofread.

A video without speech ends with the message that no speech was found in the video, along with a Try again button. Quick tools transcribe spoken words. For silent footage, open the video in the editor and ask the Agent to caption it from what is on screen.

Other tools in the row, and when to open the editor

The row holds five more one-shot jobs with the same drop, run and download pattern:

• Extract audio saves the sound as its own file.
• Isolate voice keeps the speech and drops music and noise.
• Isolate music keeps the music and drops the voice.
• Add watermark stamps text over the whole clip.
• Mute audio strips the audio track.

Isolate voice and Isolate music use credits by the length of the video.

Quick tools suit a clip you want to post today with a standard look. Open the editor when you want to proofread before rendering, position the captions or work on the cut itself.

Run it on a clip

Open the Projects page in DepCut and run Add captions on a short clip to see the result.