Shot changes are a change of location, scene or angle of the camera. Shot changes are extremely common and almost no audiovisual content is a one-shot take —even if it’s just an interview between two people in a room— the idea being that these changes, aside from showing relevant information, provide liveliness and more emotion to your content.
Shot changes are actually an important factor in professional subtitling too.
Broadcasters and streaming platforms, such as the BBC, Netflix, Amazon, HBO and many other companies require their subtitles to be sensitive to shot changes and to adapt their in- and out times to them.
This is what they look like in our editor:
Why are shot changes important in subtitling?
Consider accounting for shot changes the finishing touch to professional subtitles. Shot changes are one of the most visually noticeable events happening on screen. Any shot change can introduce a whole new set of colours, objects and people on your video. Now think of another visually significant event. That's right, your subtitles themselves.
Subtitles are produced after the video footage is already delivered and their appearance fully bends to the nature of the audio and video: mostly by timing to the audio that the subtitle event represents— for obvious reasons— but also by timing your subtitles around a shot change.
The reason is that misalignment between subtitles and shot changes can falsely suggest that a new subtitle has "flashed" on screen and encourage viewers to read it again, even if it was the background, not the captions, that have changed. This can compromise the organic flow of the subtitles and can harm the seamless experience you want to give to your viewers. That's definitely not something you want— especially if you're producing content for a potentially broad audience!
What are the shot change presets?
Briefly put, your subtitles should never start or end in an uncomfortable position from the shot change, and this requires three numbers (also called the "shot change presets"). If your file takes into account shot change timing and you have not selected the presets yourself, it will contain the default Happy Scribe presets, as specified below.
These are the most commonly used parameters for shot changes.
Setting | Meaning |
Snap before shot change | Subtitles should end 2 frames before the shot change or at least 12 frames from it, nothing in between (that's the snap area). |
Snap after shot change | Subtitles should start on the shot change or at least 12 frames from it, nothing in between (that's the snap area). |
Snap area | The snap area is 11 by default, which means that only a distance of 12 frames or bigger will not trigger a snapping to shot change. |
Crossing shot changes
Subtitles can only cross shot changes if the dialogue they represent does too. In that case, they cannot start in the snap area before the shot change or end in the snap area after the shot change. This is also accounted for.
How can I customize the shot change presets?
You're free to customize the presets yourself and decide the size of the snap area (as well as the in and out cues) by going to your style guides and specifying your shot change presets at the bottom of the timing presets. Click on Custom, and you will see the following below:
Snap before shot change: 2, 1 or 0 frames before the shot change.
Snap after shot change: 0, 1 or 2 frames after the shot change.
Snap area: 11-0 frames within the shot change.
Can I enable or disable the snapping myself?
Snapping refers to the practice of timing subtitle appearances and disappearances to coincide precisely with shot changes in a video. This means that subtitles will appear or disappear at the exact moment when the scene or camera angle changes:
You can control whether snapping to shot changes occurs while editing your file. To do so, locate the toggle on the top-right corner of the sound bar:
Shot changes are freely included as part of our automatic and human service and will grant you an even higher level of subtitle quality. Happy Scribing!