What to do when subtitles find no speech in your cut

You open the Subtitles tab, press Generate subtitles, wait for Transcribing… to finish, and the panel says: "No speech was found in this cut, so no subtitles were added to the video." The button now reads Try again.

The transcriber listens to the mix of everything audible in your cut. If that mix is silent, or holds no talking, there is nothing to write down.

Check what the cut can actually play

Work through these in order.

1. Play the cut and listen to the stretch where you expect speech. If you hear nothing, the cause is on the timeline.
2. Look at the speaker icons in the gutter at the left edge of the timeline. A speaker that shows as off reads Unmute track on hover. Click it.
3. Open Clip options (the three-dot button on a clip) and look for Unmute clip. A muted clip adds nothing to the mix.
4. Select a soundtrack clip and open the Mute tab in the right panel. Switch Mute audio off.
5. Check the source. A still image or a screen recording captured without sound has no audio track and mixes as silence.

The mix draws on the main track, the upper tracks and the soundtrack rows. A talking-head clip that you muted to lay music underneath adds nothing to it, so the music is all the transcriber hears.

Dialogue on an overlaid clip is transcribed as long as that clip is neither muted nor disabled.

Try again with the right settings

Above the button, a menu sets the language. Detect language lets the transcriber work out the spoken language. Pick a specific language only when the whole cut uses it.

1. Fix the muted source.
2. Choose the language.
3. Press Try again.

While it runs, you can keep editing. The captions appear in the panel when the run finishes.

Mind the captions you already have

A run replaces the captions on the active track. Regenerate, which shows once captions exist, says so in its tooltip: it transcribes the cut again and replaces the captions, and the change is undoable. A run that finds no speech also clears the active track. If that happens by accident, press ⌘Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows) and your captions return. Other language tracks stay as they were.

Other messages in this panel

• Add a video to the timeline first. The cut holds no clips and no soundtrack. Add media, then run it again.
• Still uploading "name" — try again once it finishes. One of the clips is still copying to the project. Wait for the top bar to read Saved.
• Subtitle tracks changed while working — run it again. You removed a subtitle track while the run was working. Press the button once more.

After the captions appear

When the captions land, open the Content tab and correct any word by typing in it. Open DepCut and re-run Generate subtitles after you unmute the source.