Now I’m going to subtitle a 30-minute video. Every time I add a text filter, I have to zoom in and out of the timeline, find the ends and narrow them down to about the same size. Then enlarge the time axis and fine-tune the beginning and end. The workload is horrible.
Why can’t you add a track called “subtitles” separately, and each subtitle inserted lasts one second by default. Or in keyframe editing mode, I can right-click and select “Here is the start time of the filter” and “Here is the end time of the filter”?
You do not need a dedicated track type for what you are doing, which is called titling and not really subtitles as a timed text stream. You can easily add text clips to a video track that you can rename from VN to “Titles” or similar. It sounds like you are adding text filters to image/video clips or a track and adjusting them the hard way as you described. The default text clip duration is 4 seconds. You can change that in an obscure way:
open an image file
view properties
change the duration
click Set Default
Now, not only images but also Text and some of the other generators in Open Other use this new default duration.
Maybe I will separate out default duration for each generator in the near future.
If there is support for a true subtitle as timed text stream (not rendered into exported video), then it will likely get a dedicated track type.
You could look into the subtitle capability of Elusien’s WebVfx framework which he described on his web page (http://www.elusien.co.uk/shotcut/webvfx/index.php). If you never used the Overlay HTML/Text: HTML, this might be intimidating. There are some tutorials about it, especially the ones by jonray are helpful.
An alternative workflow is that you can pick a transparent clip and apply a Text Simple filter to it (Clicking on Open Other > Text does this in one option). Set all of your settings in Text in regards to font, size, positioning, etc… Then take that very clip and put it in your playlist. Now every time you want to make a new subtitle line simply bring down that very clip from the playlist that has all of the settings already applied to the video track. From that point on all you have to do is time the line and enter text.
