How to Create Subtitles in Kdenlive: 2 Techniques
Once upon a time, like most aspects of video editing, creating subtitles for your project required separate and often expensive software on top of your video editor. But with the rise of AI, automatically subtitling your project has become the norm.
What was once a long chore has largely become a click-and-forget procedure that takes minutes at most, with results that are as accurate as ever. We’ll be looking at that process in the free Kdenlive editor.
What Is the Difference Between VOSK and Whisper?
With the release of Kdenlive 23.04, the open-source video editorgot a Whisper speech-to-text engine powered by OpenAI. At the time of writing, Whisper exists alongside the original VOSK engine, and both function identically for the purposes of this article.
The differences between the two are largely related to accuracy, with Whisper promising a more natural-sounding language processing system and, potentially, the ability to translate languages into English on the fly.
1. How to Create Subtitles in Kdenlive Manually
While time-consuming, creating your subtitles manually has the advantage of giving you more control over the timing of the text as it appears. As good as voice recognition has become in recent years, it doesn’t always get it right. So there’s something to be said for doing it yourself rather than digging through a full timeline looking for an AI’s mistakes.
To begin generating subtitles, right-click on a clip in your timeline and chooseClip in Project Bin. This will automatically find the clip in your bin and highlight it for the speech recognition tool to find.
2. How to Create Subtitles in Kdenlive Automatically
That was the hard way of doing it. But what about letting the software take care of it for you?
Some sites,such as YouTube, can add subtitles on the back end, which can be helpful if that platform is your intended audience. But as with any automatic method, there are some advantages to doing it manually, accuracy being likely the biggest, but also being able to adjust your subtitle timing as you proceed.
However, in the case of small scenes, the automatic subtitle tool will do an admirable job in only four steps.
Once the program has done its thing, the subtitles will appear in hopefully the correct place, meaning you can skip the final steps of splitting the subtitles manually as you had above. While this is certainly faster, it can have a tendency to display the subtitles a little early, and can be adjusted if it bothers you. But other than that, that’s all there is to it.
Easily Create Subtitles in Kdenlive
In our example, the difference in time between manually creating the subtitles and having the program do it for us was fairly minimal. It was a short 18-second scene with only five lines of dialog in total. On a larger project, that efficiency would obviously scale upwards.
When you reach the point where you are working on a deadline to finish a 30-minute project, every minute saved is precious, and so the value of automatic subtitling can’t be overstated whether that automation is built into your video editor or from a separate program.
Adding subtitles to your content will make it more accessible and engaging. And these auto subtitle generators will do the heavy lifting for you.
Who asked for these upgrades?
You don’t need to fork out for expensive hardware to run an AI on your PC.
Your phone is a better editor than you give it credit for.
Flagship price, mid-range phone.
Every squeak is your PC’s way of crying for help.
