Unintuitive captions workflow

[zerotraceme]

Description

Just started using Cap and really enjoy it so far, thank you for your efforts!
When generating captions with the medium model it gives good results in German, however the timing feels weird. Segments are long and on screen for too long. When trying to change the sections and adjust timing I really hit a dead end in terms of usability.

Caption segment start / end times arrow up/down doesn't work properly to adjust. Also these don't really adjust the start / end of the previous / next segment. So with this flow it would be great to have a button that adjusts the selected start of a captions segment to where the cursor is in the timeline, and also have it adjust the previous sections end point. Kind of like a legato mode. Then my workflow would be watching the video, noticing a timing issue, setting the cursor exactly where the next segment should start, hitting a button -> boom segments adjusted

I think it would be ultimately more intuitive to also have the captions generated as a timeline where i can then use a tool to move the "cut" or change to the next subtitle segment forwards or backwards to the cursor position. Shortcuts for that would also be helpful then.

Because now it's just too much of weird manual effort and even then I can't make it work somehow.

Again, I really enjoy using Cap so far and other areas work great, just thought I'd mention that I struggled with this particular area when using it.

Additional Context

• Cap version: Version 0.4.71 (0.4.71)
• Operating system, version: Mac OS 14.3 (23D56)
• Device (optional): MaBook Pro 13-inch, M1, 2020

[linear]

CAP-656

[tembo]

Thanks for the detailed feedback on the caption editing workflow.

There's an open PR that directly addresses several of these pain points: #1615 - Keyboard and captions tracks. It introduces timeline-based caption tracks with visual segment editing capabilities including:

• Drag-to-move segments on the timeline
• Resize handles for adjusting segment boundaries
• Split functionality for breaking segments apart
• A new CaptionsTrack.tsx component that provides the visual timeline representation you're describing

The current caption editing UI lives in apps/desktop/src/routes/editor/CaptionsTab.tsx. It has numeric inputs for start/end times (lines 912-945) and an "Add at Current Time" button that creates a segment at the playhead position. The "legato mode" concept you mentioned (adjusting one segment's start while automatically adjusting the previous segment's end) would be a nice addition to the workflow being built in #1615.

Related: #1522 tracks another caption timing issue where generated captions don't respect video cuts.

For the arrow key adjustment not working properly - the inputs use standard HTML <input type="number"> with step="0.1", so arrow keys should increment by 0.1 seconds. If this isn't working as expected, capturing more detail about the specific behavior would be helpful.

[zerotraceme]

Ah amazing, thank you for the fast response (good bot)! Yes I think I also experienced the ignored video cuts thing, great to know it's already tracked here.

The inputs seem to only decrease and only to a certain point, and I can't click the up arrow at all it seems.
Here is a cap screenrecording which hopefully illustrates this:
https://record.inspired-productivity.com/s/mxqmy8yc9wpnzmn