Shot changes are a change of location, scene or angle in any video. Shot changes are extremely common and almost no video 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, provides liveliness and more emotion to any dialogue.

Shot changes should be accounted for in subtitling because they can falsely suggest that a new subtitle has flashed on screen and encourage viewers to read the subtitle again. This can harm the organic flow of the subtitles, which is imperative to a seamless viewing experience.

<aside> 💡 Happy Scribe presets These guidelines apply to a standard setting of:

• Cue before shot change: 2 frames
• Cue after shot change: 0 frames (so on the shot change)
• Snap area: 11 frames (from the shot change) </aside>

<aside> 💡 This is what we tell our customers about this feature: https://help.happyscribe.com/en/articles/9395512-shot-changes-in-subtitling.

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What do I need to know?

<aside> 🤩 The editor does most of the work for you! While editing your file, the syncing to shot changes is always snapped. Meaning that you won’t need to manually drag capsules to meet the guidelines. The editor will simply block you from starting or ending subtitles too close to a shot change.

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While the editor does most of the work for you, here are the 2 things you need to consider:

🔍 Pre-existing shot change issues will be listed in the issues bar, and will need to be “fixed” by you 🫵

• The automatic file will already have tried to accommodate them, but there may be remaining issues. Even if the subtitle’s timing, transcript and formatting are perfect, please check if you need to adjust its timing to acommodate the shot change.
  • You can simply move the capsule’s start or end time and it will snap to the shot change.

🪓 When you move subtitles around, the subtitles will auto-snap to shot changes

• If you move subtitle capsules around or create new ones, you cannot run into issues as the editor will auto-snap to the shot change.

For more context on what the editor is doing, here’s a full rundown of the shot changes ⬇️.

What’s the logic behind the snapping? 📹

Subtitles are only allowed to cross shot changes when the dialogue they represent also covers the shot change.

As such, it’s best to consider the rules for shot changes in two scenarios:

1. When the subtitled dialogue is not crossing the shot change.
2. When the subtitled dialogue is crossing the shot change.

Dialogue that is not crossing a shot change

This is the simplest rule. In this case it’s about timing the in and out time of subtitles around the shot change.

• The subtitles should always start on or 12+ frames after the shot change.