Clean up your subtitles

Hesitation sounds: um, uh, erm, ah, hmm and their longer spellings, plus the common ones in French, German, Dutch and Polish such as euh, äh and ehm. A comma after a filler goes with it, a full stop moves to the word before, and a sentence that started with "Um," starts with a capital again.

"Like" and "you know" stay unless you switch them on, because they are often part of what was meant ("it looks like rain"). Read the preview before you download when that switch is on. A caption that held nothing but a filler is dropped.

Subtitle files made for a 16:9 player often hold two lines of ten words or more, which covers half of a 9:16 frame. Pick 1, 2, 3 or 4 words per caption and every caption is split into even parts on one line: seven words at three per caption become three, two and two, never three, three and one.

• Each part gets screen time by its length, so a long word stays up longer than a short one.
• The first part starts when the original caption started and the last part ends when it ended, so the file stays in sync.
• Line breaks are joined, since a one-line caption is the point.

Splitting shares a caption's time out by length, which is close but not exact. Cuecaps times every word to the audio itself: it finds the words in your video, cuts the filler words from the video as well as the captions with Fast edit, and animates the captions word by word. One export gives you the MP4, and the subtitles come as SRT or VTT.