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Style captions

Last updated on Dec 14, 2023

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Learn how to style your captions using the design tools in the Essential Graphics panel.

Before you begin

Enable Automatic transcription under Import settings when you import media. Select Window > Workspaces > Captions and Graphics. Check your transcripts and generate captions.

Use the Text options in the Essential Graphics panel to change the font, text alignment, and tracking for your caption.
- Font: Set font, font style, and font size.
- Paragraph Alignment: For horizontal alignment use Left align text, Center align text, Right align text, and Justify. For Vertical alignment, use Top align text, Center text vertically and Bottom align text. This defines how a caption grows when adding additional lines.
- Tracking: Loosen or tighten the space between characters.
- Leading: Loosen or tighten the vertical space between lines.
- Faux Styles: Styles like bold, italic, all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, and underline.
Use the Align and Transform options to align your text and change its position.
- Position captions with zones: You can choose from different zones to position your caption in different areas on the screen.
- Fine tune position: Through Set Horizontal Position and Set Vertical Position you can add an offset to your zone setting.

Note:

Vertical and horizontal text alignment are automatically set according to the zone position as well.

Change the text box size: If you want to shrink or expand the text box size, you can do this through Set Horizontal Scale and Set Vertical Scale. This will affect text wrapping and paragraph alignment settings. You can also change the text box size using the text box controls in the Program Monitor.

Change the appearance of your text by playing around with the fill and stroke, background, and shadow.

Editing options in the Essential Graphics panel — You can change caption appearance by editing the controls in the Essential Graphics panel.

Fill: Change the color of your captions.
Stroke: Add single or multiple strokes. The Graphics Properties menu under the wrench menu gives you more control over stroke styling.
Background: Add a background box. You can choose the color, add additional padding and change the opacity.
Shadow: You can add a shadow and fine tune with controls such as opacity, angle, distance and more.

For more advanced edits, such as animating your captions, or adding effects to them, convert your captions to source graphics (Graphics and Titles > Upgrade Caption to Graphic). You can also set a keyboard shortcut to speed up this process.