What to Do With Your Captions After You Re-Cut a Video

You captioned the cut, then you changed the cut. Now a caption may sit on the wrong shot, or a line may belong to footage you removed. What happens next depends on the kind of edit.

Caption late when you can

DepCut writes captions from the audio mix of your cut as it is at that moment. The trims, speed changes, volumes and mute settings all count, and speech on the soundtrack or on an upper video layer is included. A muted clip adds nothing to the mix, so unmute a clip first if you want its speech captioned.

Each transcription spends account credits and replaces the hand edits on its track. The cheapest order of work is to edit the video, generate captions, proofread them and then style them.

What follows your edit

Delete a clip on the main video track, and while that track is the only video track in the project, the gap it leaves closes. Later captions, titles and soundtrack clips slide left with the footage. Captions inside the removed stretch are taken out, and a caption that straddles the edge keeps the part that survives, with its text following the surviving words.

When the project has extra video layers above the main track, a delete leaves its gap and the captions stay where they were.

After any other kind of re-cut, such as reordering, trimming or swapping footage, do not assume the captions followed. Check them.

Check before you regenerate

Play the video from the start with the Content tab of the Subtitles panel open. Click a timestamp chip to jump to any caption and watch whether it still matches the shot and the voice.

If only a few captions are off, fix them by hand. Drag a bar on the timeline to move it, drag an edge to trim it, or select it and press S to split it at the playhead. A short patch job keeps your proofreading intact.

Regenerate when many captions are off

Regenerate sits at the top of the Content tab. It transcribes the current cut again and replaces the captions on the active track.

• Your style, font, size, position and word highlight settings stay as you set them.
• Your hand edits to that track's text and timing are replaced.
• Other subtitle tracks keep their captions.
• It spends account credits, as the first transcription did.
• Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z brings the earlier captions back.

A translated track does not update when you regenerate the first track. Open the Agent and ask for the translation again. It reuses the track already set to that language and replaces its captions with fresh translations of the current source, timing included.

A routine for later changes

1. Make the edit.
2. Play through with captions on and note where they drift.
3. Patch a handful of captions by hand.
4. Run Regenerate when most of the track is off.
5. Proofread again, because the new transcript is a new draft.
6. Ask the Agent to retranslate any extra language tracks.

Test a cut

Delete a clip from the middle of a captioned project in DepCut and watch how the captions respond before you change anything else.