Transitions and subtitles

Learn this rule first, or you will keep looking in the wrong place:

Selecting the first clip works too — that is the film's own opening (fading up from black, say).

Three effects: Cross fade (the two shots overlap and dissolve), Dip to black (fade down to black, then back up) and Dip to white. Click one in the transition library on the left and it is applied.

Duration is set in the panel on the right: 0.5 seconds by default, 3 seconds at most, and never more than half the clip it sits on — beyond that, the clip would be inside the transition from start to finish. Delete is at the bottom of the same panel.

If clips on the timeline have voice-over or an available transcript, open the subtitle panel and click Generate subtitles. DOTV places each line on the subtitle track at the moment it is spoken, so you do not have to type timestamps line by line.

You can still edit the text, timing and appearance. More importantly, generated subtitles follow the edit: trim a clip, reorder clips, change speed or move a clip, and the matching subtitle moves with that material instead of staying behind and covering the wrong picture.

Regenerating replaces only the matching generated subtitles; subtitles you wrote yourself are not overwritten. If a clip has no usable speech, DOTV says which sections were not generated so you can write them by hand below.

Click Subtitles on the toolbar: a panel opens on the right and a track appears below.

• New subtitle adds one at the playhead, 2 seconds by default. So: move the playhead to the moment the line should appear, then click new.
• The list is ordered by time, and each row shows its number · start and end · the text. Click a row to select it, and the playhead jumps there.
• Two buttons at the right of a row: + adds another one straight after it (handy for a run of dialogue), and Delete.
• Once there are a lot of them, use the box at the top to search the text.

On the timeline a subtitle is a yellow bar: drag the whole bar to move it in time, drag either end to change how long it stays up.

With one selected, switch to the Text tab (creating one switches you there automatically):

• The box at the top holds the text, and it can run to several lines.
• Seven fonts (PingFang SC / Noto Sans SC / Microsoft YaHei / Songti SC / STKaiti / Arial / Impact), plus Font size, Text color and Letter spacing.
• The row of Ts in the middle is Presets: None, White with black outline, White with heavy black outline, Yellow with black outline, Red with white outline, Black with white outline. One click applies a set of values, and you can nudge them from there.
• The bottom three rows are the stroke: color, width and opacity. White text on a night scene is close to unreadable without a stroke, and clicking a preset is the quickest fix.

Font size is measured in pixels of the output frame, and the preview is exactly what you get — if it looks right in the preview, that is the size it exports at.