Quick Caption for Android

The first problem I ran into was when I switched to Chinese input. I immediately lost the ability to type any subtitles, including English. After that, I tried deleting a subtitle block, but that bug was never fixed. Finally, I tried deleting the project, but the confirmation pop-up wouldn't accept my answer or cancel the request, so I had to force the app shut. I didn't even know it was possible to get an app this horrible published on the Google App Store.

There is so much to like, but so much that isn't there. I want to love this. From the pleasing deisgn to well thoughtout workflow and speed adjustments, this looks on paper like a beast of an app, worth some money even! But it's not there yet. It feels like pre-alpha, with glitches that make it annoying if not impossible to use for more than a minute long video. For some examples, the window resizes, even in full screen, moving stuff and making working hard. The caption "blocks" don't snap, so you can't tell when they line up. Nothing indicates when you have a caption selected. You can't reorganize captions or insert new ones in the middle. If you click on the beggining to watch your captions, the last caption will take over the entire project. There are few settings, and in my opinion the default text size is way too big, but you can't change the default. The list goes on. I think these things could totally be fixed, and if they get fixed, I would LOVE this program!

This is both a review and a detailed user guide to Quick Caption. As of today, it doesn’t come with any instructions, so I wrote a detailed guide myself. If you want to go straight to the guide, it starts after the line of stars halfway down. I have worked with MacCaption before, and while that is the industry standard for pro use, Quick Caption is an excellent free alternative for short-form videos. I don't know how it would fare on a feature-length project, as it froze up my computer briefly every so often, though never crashed it. If I were to use it for a feature I'd break up the final movie file into little bite-sized pieces to create .srt files for everything I wanted to caption, then bring it into my editing software for one final export. In Premiere, you can create open captions and change the font, font size, etc. However, while Premiere does closed captions too, they look terrible and you can’t format them. If you make captions in Quick Caption and bring them back into Premiere, Premiere will format them as if you had done them in Premiere in the first place, so if that’s what you’re using to edit with, you may as well just create them from scratch there. If you do choose to go back and forth between this software and Premiere-- when you import your Quick Caption .srt into Premiere, check each caption to make sure the entire text fits onscreen. I'd err on the side of typing out smaller sentences, as in, the amount of words onscreen is not more than four or five. The interface is nicely done, and the software does what it is supposed to do. For a free app, you can't complain! One thing I’d like to see in an update is an option to save your work. There is a “Save Library” option but I don’t see any confirmation that my file has been saved, and no dialogue box asking how or where I want to save it to appears. Thus, I can only conclude that you can’t save your work in this program. ************ Here are my basic instructions to help anyone needing direction about how to use this program: In Quick Caption, click on the down arrow icon to either start a new project or open an existing one. Make sure that the icon of the project is selected in the project viewing panel, which you can open by clicking the icon all the way to the left on the top tool bar, which looks like a series of lines stacked in a slant. Or, go to the View menu and click Project Navigator. Click the down arrow icon again, and now you will see a dialogue box asking you to find the movie you want to import. Select a movie, and Quick Caption will import it. The middle window will now populate with your movie file in the form of a timeline. If you are only seeing one or two windows, click the pen tool icon on the upper RH side of the screen. It’s the second icon from the left. That will show you your Captions Editor. You can also go to the View menu and select it there. If you haven’t already opened the project viewing panel, you don’t need to, unless you are captioning multiple files. If you are captioning several files at once though, I’d stick with opening one at a time. You can’t save your work, so it doesn’t make sense to have more than one project open at a time anyway, unless you have to cut and paste information from the captions editor window. The program, though effective, freezes slightly from time to time, so don’t chance losing your work if you have many projects open and haven’t yet exported them. So now you should be looking at at least a timeline and a Captions Editor, possibly the Project Navigator window too if you opted to keep it open. The Captions Editor looks like a blank grey window. At the bottom of the Captions Editor, you will see a bar where you can type in your captions, which reads “New Caption Line.” Type in your captions and press “Return” on your keyboard, or “Done,” which is the button to the right of the caption line bar. In the timeline you will see a little purple box appear on a second video track each time you create a new caption line. These are your captions. If you need to edit any of the caption text, click on the caption’s line in the Caption Editor. Go slowly— maybe it’s just my computer but it took a moment to update each time I did this. Now make sure your captions are describing the correct audio. You can hover your mouse over the purple boxes to drag the in and out points to the correct places over your movie. To navigate the timeline, you can use the transport controls which are under the timecode, which is under the movie window. Alternatively, you can drag the playhead by clicking and dragging on the inverted white triangle at the top of the red playhead indicator. If you click the left-facing arrow in the transport controls, the playhead will step back one frame. If you click the right-facing arrow, it will step forward one frame. If you click either of the rounded arrow icons, you will be taken backwards or forward several frames. You can click the play icon to play, or use the space bar to start and stop the video. To change or format the font, to name your captioned file before exporting, or to determine the output path, click the Style Editor icon in the upper right-hand corner of the caption window. It looks like three sliders. To return to your captioning window, click the pen tool icon again. Continue creating captions in the Caption Editor and adjusting their place in the timeline as needed until you finish your video. Before you export, watch your video to make sure that the captions actually match your movie, and that everything comes on and goes off in the correct place. You can’t save your project, but if you are worried about losing all your typing, I suggest having a text file open while you are creating your captions and copy-pasting each new caption you create into it. If you program crashes, or you need to repeat the process in another program, you can save yourself time by copy and pasting from the text file.

Point the cursor on timeline where you want the subtitle, then take a look at the right bottom corner where it says “New Caption Line” start typing the subtitle there and then enter done. This will create a one subtitle and then repeat the process until you are done. I believe it is a great effort by Nate Thomson. We should totally appreciate it. But a simple tutorial would simply bring a life to this software and not only that it is also a sensible thing to do for any developer. Thanks again.

I want this to work. The UI looks simple/straightforward, but can ony enter in one line of text and then can't see any way to specify the timecode for the entries.