How to pick a template and change font, size, colour, outline, plate and position — and what reaches the exported file versus what stays in the preview.
Caption design is what separates a video that looks produced from a file with text on it. The system is built so that you start from a ready template and change only what needs changing.
The Templates tab holds 35 ready designs. Clicking one applies it to the preview immediately, so you judge a result rather than a name. Older projects built on a design that is no longer offered continue to render exactly as they were built.
When the language is Hebrew, the Hebrew designs float to the top of the list — there is no point offering you a Latin display face first.
On the Style tab:
Whatever you assemble can be saved as your own preset and applied to other projects.
The Position tab has a nine-point grid, a direction setting (automatic, right-to-left or left-to-right), precise position fields and a fine nudge pad. You can also simply drag the caption in the preview — the drag is kept and exported. Note that clicking a new template resets a manual position.
This is what is usually called karaoke. On the Style tab, beneath the text colour, sit the spoken-word colour and beside it the highlight style: colour, box, glow or underline. Choosing anything other than colour switches the animation to karaoke automatically.
Three of them — colour, box and glow — reach the exported file. An underline cannot be animated in the file, so a template using it is burned with a colour highlight instead.
This is the most important part of this article. Most beautiful display fonts contain no Hebrew letters. When you choose such a template, a Hebrew face of similar character is substituted behind the scenes — Anton becomes Suez One, Montserrat becomes Secular One, Bebas Neue becomes Karantina, Playfair becomes Frank Ruhl Libre. The result looks like the template rather than like boxes.
But if you chose a font yourself from the font list, that substitution does not happen — deliberately, because overriding an explicit choice of yours would be wrong. So if you picked a Latin font by hand and your Hebrew captions look wrong or fall back to a default face, the fix is to choose a font that covers Hebrew, or to return to the template.
Punctuation is handled separately: an invisible direction mark is added to every line so a full stop or question mark lands on the correct side.
Reaches the file: font, size, weight, colour, outline, the shadow with all its parts, rotation, underline, plate and corner radius, letter spacing, capitals, a manual position, and karaoke highlighting.
Stays in the preview: entrance animations such as fade, pop or slide. Only karaoke-style highlighting is burned in. A dashed border is burned as a solid line, and shadow blur is capped in the file — in the browser blur touches only the shadow, while in the file it softens the letters themselves, and uncapped it would smear the text.
The size in the file is taken from the preview's own measurement, which is why the difference between what you saw and what was burned measures in single-digit percentages.
If the design matters to you and the destination does not accept ASS, burn the captions into the video.
You probably chose a font by hand. When a font is picked explicitly, no Hebrew substitution is applied even if the font is Latin-only. Return to the template or choose a font that covers Hebrew.
On the Style tab, beneath the text colour — the spoken-word colour field, with the highlight style beside it.
Entrance animations are a preview effect. Only spoken-word highlighting is burned in, because it is the one thing burned captions can animate.
Yes, and it is exported too. Note that clicking a new template, or the position grid, resets a manual position.