Captions & Transcript

Evidor transcribes speech in real time, drops captions onto the timeline, and lets you delete words in a transcript to cut the corresponding video. This page covers both workflows.

Auto captions

Click the Captions button in the Project media toolbar, or press Shift+C. The Auto captions dialog opens.

1. Pick a language from the dropdown. English, Romanian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin are supported out of the box.
2. Move the playhead to where you want transcription to begin.
3. Click Start listening and begin speaking. Evidor uses the browser's speech recognition engine, which runs on your machine and does not send audio to any server.
4. Captions appear in the live panel as you talk. Interim results are shown in grey; final results are committed to the segment list.
5. Click Stop listening when you are done.

Each committed segment shows its start and end time, and an editable text field. Fix any typos directly in the field. Click the small × next to a segment to remove it.

When you are happy with the segments, click Add to timeline. Evidor creates a caption clip on the topmost unlocked video track, spanning from the first to the last segment. The captions are drawn as centered white text with a black outline near the bottom of the frame.

Editing the caption clip

Once captions are on the timeline, they are a normal caption clip. You can:

• Drag the clip to move the whole caption track earlier or later in time.
• Trim its edges to shorten the captioned section.
• Change its position, opacity, scale, and rotation from the Transform section of the inspector.
• Delete it if you change your mind.

Caption clips are rendered with the same pipeline as video clips, so blend modes, effects, and masks all work on them. Their default position is 70% down the frame, which you can adjust by editing the Y coordinate in the Transform section.

Text-based editing

If you ran Auto captions, Evidor also stored a word-level transcript. Open it with Text-based editing from the Project media toolbar, or press T.

The transcript dialog shows one line per spoken segment. Hover any word to reveal a small × button. Clicking it:

1. Splits every clip that overlaps the word's time range.
2. Deletes the middle section, which removes the word from the video and audio.
3. Closes the gap by shifting the later clips on the same track earlier.
4. Updates the transcript so that line no longer contains the removed word.

You can also click anywhere on a line to jump the playhead to that point, and use the small scissors icon next to a line to remove the whole line in one click.

Remove fillers

The Remove fillers button in the transcript dialog searches the transcript for common filler words: um, uh, erm, hmm, like, you know, i mean, basically, actually, literally, right, so yeah. It then cuts every span that contains one of them, using the same process as deleting a word.

A confirm dialog appears before anything is cut, showing how many spans will be removed. Accept, and Evidor does the whole pass in one go. Undo is available afterwards if you do not like the result.

Trim silences

The Trim silences button scans every audio clip on the timeline for spans longer than 0.6 seconds where the audio level stays below about 3% of full scale. Each detected silence is cut the same way a filler word is.

This is a fast way to tighten a talking-head video without manually scrubbing for pauses. As with fillers, a confirm dialog appears first, and undo is available.

Exporting subtitles

Captions are stored with the project and can be exported as standalone subtitle files. From the File menu choose:

• Export subtitles (SRT) - writes a SubRip file with the standard HH:MM:SS,mmm timestamps.
• Export subtitles (VTT) - writes a WebVTT file with HH:MM:SS.mmm timestamps, suitable for the web.

Each exported file is named after the project. Subtitles are broken into lines of about 42 characters so they fit comfortably on screen.

Caption clips vs. subtitle files

There are two distinct things called "captions" in Evidor:

• Caption clips - the burned-in text that appears in the exported video. They are timeline clips.
• Subtitle files - sidecar .srt or .vtt files that a player loads separately. They are not visible in the exported video.

If you want a permanent, always-visible caption, use caption clips. If you want to give viewers the option to turn subtitles on or off, use the sidecar files.