Highlight the Spoken Word in Your Captions

Karaoke-style captions pull the eye along the sentence and keep attention on talking-head clips. In DepCut it is one switch in the Subtitles panel, and every built-in caption style supports it.

Turn it on

1. Open Subtitles and switch to the Options tab. Captions need to exist first, so run Generate subtitles if you have not.
2. Switch on Highlight spoken word.
3. Play the video. Each word lights up as it is spoken, in the preview and in the exported file.

Choose the treatment

Once the switch is on, a group of three buttons appears: Color, Underline and Highlight.

• Color changes the color of the spoken word.
• Underline colors the word and underlines it.
• Highlight draws a colored box behind the word.

The color swatch beside the buttons sets the color of the effect. In box mode DepCut picks dark or light letters on your custom color so the word stays readable.

Each style begins with a treatment of its own. Clean, Curiosity hook, Typewriter, Block and Bubblegum start with a yellow box. Highlighter starts with a pink-red box and white letters. Minimal and Editorial start with a yellow underline, and Big & punchy and Neon with a white one. Any mode or color you choose overrides the starting point.

Keep the timing accurate

The highlight follows the word timings that came with the transcript. Those timings stay in place when you:

• leave the generated captions alone,
• replace a word with another single word,
• split a caption with Enter in the Content tab.

They are dropped for a caption when you add or delete words in it, or when you drag or trim its bar on the timeline. DepCut then spreads that caption's words across its time by word length. The result is close, and it can drift on a caption with long pauses.

A good order of work is to correct wording with same-length swaps first and to avoid retiming the captions where you want the sharpest highlight.

Make the highlight easy to follow

• Pick a highlight color with strong contrast against the caption text and against the plate behind it.
• Keep captions short. A highlight is easier to follow across a few words than across a long line.
• Choose Underline or Color for a quiet effect and Highlight for a loud one.
• Use one treatment through the whole video so viewers learn it in the first second.

On busy footage, pair the highlight with a plate style. The plate keeps the words that are waiting to be said readable while the active word stands out.

Turn it off

Switch Highlight spoken word off and the color and mode choices go with it. Reset to style also clears the highlight, along with any font and size changes you made.

Light up your next video

Switch on Highlight spoken word in a captioned project in DepCut and play a few lines to see which treatment suits your footage.