Fix Captions That Appear Too Early or Too Late

DepCut checks generated caption times against the audio and moves caption edges onto the speech they belong to, so most captions open and close with the voice. A few still need a nudge. When a music bed plays under the whole cut, or a caption boundary falls in the middle of a sentence, the audio has no clear edge to offer and the transcriber's own time stays.

Here is how to fix those by hand.

Find the problem

Play the video with the Content tab of the Subtitles panel open. The highlighted caption is the one on screen right now. Click a timestamp chip to jump to the start of any caption and listen to how it lines up with the voice.

On the timeline, every caption is an amber bar in the subtitle row. The same bars are where you fix timing.

Move or trim a caption

Drag a bar sideways to move it. It snaps to nearby edges, including the playhead and the cuts between clips, so lining a caption up with a cut takes one drag. A caption that appears too early moves right, and one that appears late moves left.

Drag the left or right edge of a bar to trim it. Trim the start to make a caption appear later. Trim the end to make it leave sooner, or pull the end out to keep a caption up long enough to read when there is room before the next one.

Split or remove a caption

When one caption holds two sentences, divide it:

1. Click the caption's bar to select it.
2. Move the playhead to the point where the caption should divide.
3. Press S.

The caption splits in two at the playhead, and each half keeps the words it covers. If your mouse is over the timeline, the split lands where the pointer is. Then move or trim each half on its own. You can also press Enter inside the text in the Content tab to split at the cursor.

To remove a caption, select its bar and press Delete or Backspace. It disappears from the preview and the export.

What retiming does to word timing

Dragging or trimming a caption drops its word timings. That makes no difference to plain captions. If you use Highlight spoken word, DepCut spreads that caption's words across its new time in proportion to their length, which is close but can drift. Splitting keeps the word timings for the words each half contains.

When to use Regenerate

If many captions are off, for example after you re-edit the video, Regenerate at the top of the Content tab is faster than fixing them one by one. It gives the active track a fresh transcript of the current cut. Expect it to use account credits and to overwrite your hand edits, and know that undo restores the earlier captions if you change your mind. For a handful of misplaced captions, fix them by hand.

Whichever route you take, play the whole video once with sound afterward. The preview and the exported file use the same caption times, so what you see in the editor is what viewers get.

Fix one now

Play your latest captioned project through in DepCut and drag the first bar that sits off the voice.