Quick Start: Create Your First Animated Captions in After Effects
This guide takes you from a clip with speech to finished, animated captions in your composition. It assumes Captyne is already installed. If not, start with the Windows or Mac install guide.
1. Open your composition
Open the comp that contains the speech and make it the active comp. Then open Window → Extensions → Captyne.
2. Pick a caption style
On the Setup tab, click a preset thumbnail in My Presets. The selected preset gets a green border. You can browse more styles in the Marketplace tab.
3. Choose where the audio comes from
- Source Type → Active AE Comp uses the audio of your current comp. This is the most common choice.
- Manual Media File lets you pick an audio or video file instead.
4. Choose a transcription provider
Offline / Local is free and private, and the Managed API is fast and needs no setup. See which provider to use.
Leave Language on Auto-detect unless the language is detected wrongly.
5. Set how captions are grouped
- Words / Phrase: how many words appear on screen together.
- Words / Line: when a phrase wraps onto a second line.
- Reveal Mode: whether a phrase appears at once or word by word. See Reveal modes explained.
6. Click Transcribe
Captyne extracts the audio, transcribes it with word-level timing, groups the words into phrases and switches to the Preview tab.
7. Review and fix the words
The Preview tab shows every phrase as a group of word chips. Before generating, you can fix spelling, merge or delete words, change which words are emphasised and adjust the groups. See Editing captions before you generate.
8. Generate Captions
Click Generate Captions. Captyne builds the caption layers in your comp: one text layer per word, with the preset's effects, animation and timing markers already applied. To change the timing later, see Adjusting caption timing.
Tip: your transcript and every edit are saved with the project, so you never have to transcribe the same clip twice. See Your captions are saved with your project.