Managing titles and subtitles with kdenlive

[ Object , create a title , create an animated title ( with a sequence of images , with the animation generator , with glaxnimate ), create a subtitle , create a subtitle by automatic voice recognition , place the titles ]

Managing titles and subtitles with Kdenlive

Last modified August 2, 2024

This site has been automatically translated with Google Translate from this original page written in french, there may be some translation errors

Object

This page is part of a tutorial to explain video editing with kdenlive and which includes the following topics:

Introduction

Presentation and configuration

Project preparation

Fix performance issues

The rough cut

Apply effects

Add transitions

Managing titles and subtitles (this page)

Keyframe Management

Video Calibration

Export your video

Create a title

Now we will prepare a simple title as an instruction for our video, from the Project->Add Title Video menu.

We first start by defining the font size (between 75 and 90), the color, and then you can write only after. Note that you can add a background image and make animations. We can also very easily make a title animation that scrolls in the Star Wars style. In the example given, we will stick to something very simple. After clicking OK , your title clip appears in the list with the other clips in the project tree.

Some additional tips for going further, at the level of the buttons in the title window

the first button on the left is used to move an object (text, image, shape style)
the second allows you to add a text type object
the third allows you to add a rectangle-type shape, this can be useful to reinforce the contrast so that the text is more visible like this

and this will give this once integrated into the video

Let's continue the enumeration with the fifth button, it's the same thing but with the shape of an ellipse
The sixth button allows you to add an image as a wallpaper
the seventh button allows you to open a file in title format
the eighth button allows you to save the title in a file in title format
The last button allows you to download additional title templates from the community

We then create another generic end title which will be placed at the end of the edit and we will proceed in exactly the same way for all the possible subtitles which we can place in the video.

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Create an animated title

With a sequence of images

We will now discuss importing a sequence of images, what is the point? It could be to make a slideshow, in this case we will take a sequence of images to create an animation, they were created with Synfig Studio and we will place them at the beginning of our montage. We import them from the Project->Add an image sequence menu , in the window below I have indicated the directory that contains the images, the image format and the time between 2 images (in this case it is very short to give the animation effect).

and this is what it looks like at the Project Sources level , we can see our two title clips and the slideshow clip that I placed in a previously created Titles directory, by default it takes the name of the text, but you can rename them.

We now finish by importing a clip with a white background that we will use for the slideshow clip. We go to Project->Add a colored video , we choose the color, we can leave the Duration by default.

There you go, there you go, we have almost everything we need to start our editing, we will come back to the page on the rough cut to add the soundtrack if necessary. I also import my jingle, the screaming sound of the seagull that we find at the beginning of my videos on my youtube channel.

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With the animation generator

Other cool stuff useful for credits, in Project->Generators or by clicking in the Project Sources area from the context menu, you can easily generate a counter that will look great at the beginning of the video

You can also generate a pattern or noise, just like on a good old analog TV. However, it is not as powerful as OpenShot Video Editor which offers 3D animated titles using blender.

With Glaxnimate

You also have the possibility to create 2D animations with Glaxnimate which is integrated into kdenlive and a brief description of which is given here.

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Create a subtitle

You can add subtitles to your video, at the timeline level we will click on the tool

we see that the Subtitles track appears, by double clicking on this track, we insert a subtitle and you can type your text directly at the timeline level or even from the Subtitles sub window accessible via the View->Subtitles menu.

You will notice the subtitle configuration window accessible via the button

which allows you to customize the style, pointed to by the mouse below.

You can also import a .SRT subtitle file or export your own .SRT subtitle files all accessible from the Project menu .

If you want to know more about the use of subtitles I refer you to this page (thanks to its author Gérald by the way) which explains how to integrate subtitles. The context being a video recording of a drone which integrates telemetry data in the form of a subtitle track.

Create subtitles using automatic speech recognition

Kdenlive integrates a speech recognition and text transcription device to create subtitles. In the configuration settings, there is a Speech Recognition icon for this purpose, we will retrieve models for the French language on this site https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models that we can import from the window below.

You can also use the speech recognition system Whisper which recognizes punctuations very well and can also automatically translate into English. In the window below you can choose as Computing Device the GPU instead of the CPU which is much slower as mentioned, I disabled the FP16 which is not recognized by my CPU.

Now we can start the speech recognition process with Whisper and translation from the Project->Subtitles->Speech Recognition menu, choose the area of the timeline to transcribe, then click on Process.

Automatic transcription option

and the calculation is gone with an automatic translation into English

And it will give something like this on a tutorial project, it works more or less well but the generated texts could possibly be reworked in the Subtitles space

More information here https://docs.kdenlive.org/en/effects_and_compositions/speech_to_text.html

Place the title on the timeline

We're almost there! Let's move on to the title of the video that we created previously, we're going to make sure that it's superimposed on the first clip (still without counting the animation at the beginning). On the other hand, the title must be on track V1 above the other clips so that it is displayed correctly superimposed on the video track present in V2, so we'll have to do some clip swaps from one track to another if necessary, in the end we get this:

By default the title is superimposed on the clip of track V2 for the duration of the title as can be seen in the Project Monitor.

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LAMP

Securing

Managing titles and subtitles with Kdenlive

Object

Create a title

Create an animated title

With a sequence of images

With the animation generator

With Glaxnimate

Create a subtitle

Create subtitles using automatic speech recognition

Place the title on the timeline