I have a simple project: audio track, static image, subtitles. I select a subtitle, click on Edit subtitle style. It opens “Default” style. I increase the size from 20 to 40. Preview is showing what expected to see, I click Ok. I close Subtitle Style Editor. In Project Monitor nothing have changed.
I don’t know what I am doing wrong. But I cannot solve this problem for several months now.
Hi, and welcome to the forum and community.
Please help us helping you by stating the OS and version of Kdenlive you are using. Also, whether it is the installed or standalone version (appimage for Linux).
Sorry, I meant to, but forgot.
Kdenlive: 25.04.2
MLT: 7.30.0
FFmpeg
KDE Frameworks: 6.15.0
Qt: Using 6.9.0 and built against 6.9.0
NixOS 25.11 (Xantusia) (Wayland)
Build ABI: x86_64-little_endian-lp64
Kernel: linux 6.12.34
I’m using nixpkgs package.
Please try the appimage, it works for me with 25.04.3 …
Still doesn’t work.
I’ll add visual representation of the problem.
Maybe I do something incorrectly. Maybe I need to refresh the project after changing subtitle styles. I don’t know. One year ago when I was working on this project, I just added subtitles, adjusted size, and all is done. After introduction of subtitle styles, I was unable to achieve previous results.
So I guess I just don’t fully understand them yet, maybe I do something wrong.
If it matters, my goal is very simple: I need to hard-code subtitles.
Are you sure the style you are changing is the one that the clip in the timeline is using?
You can have multiple styles.
What do the relevant Style and Dialogue lines in the saved .ass file show?
I have only one (Default) style. These are the first few lines of original subtitles file. I see that style uses incorrect font and size.
[Script Info]
; This is an Advanced Sub Station Alpha v4+ script.
Title:
ScriptType: v4.00+
PlayDepth: 0
ScaledBorderAndShadow: Yes
[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,&H0000FFFF,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,1,1,2,10,10,10,1
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:17.07,0:00:26.80,Default,,0,0,0,,{\i1\c&H6f72ff&}Командир флота далеков вызывает\Nвсе временны́е корабли далеков.{\c}{\i0}
In previous versions Kdenlive made a copy of subtitles file when I added it to the project. However, I can’t find copy of this file anywhere.
So, how to edit subtitles with Kdenlive? I guess I can edit .ass file itself but that hardly seems right.
Is this after you have saved the project with your changes to the style?
In the current version, the project monitor will not update until you “ok” that editor dialog, and the project .ass file will not change until you save the project.
(In the new code I’m working on for this, changes are applied in real time as you make them, but that’s not the case at present).
In previous versions Kdenlive made a copy of subtitles file when I added it to the project. However, I can’t find copy of this file anywhere.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. There are temporary “working copy” .ass files created in /tmp while you are editing, and you should have .kdenlive and .ass project files in your project dir when you save a project.
I guess I can edit
.assfile itself but that hardly seems right.
Yes, and yes to this. There are definitely bugs and niggles in the current subtitle code but this part of it does work. So if you’re still seeing this with the 25.04.3 AppImage - then something weird is going on…
And my first bet has to be “you’re doing something ‘wrong’” or missing some detail - but neither of us can see what that is yet 
Yes. I just reopened my project. It still has a style with Liberation Sans font of size 1000.
Yes, that’s correct. In my project directory I now see video.kdenlive.ass with contents:
[Script Info]
; Script generated by Kdenlive 25.04.3
LayoutResX: 1280
LayoutResY: 720
PlayDepth: 0
PlayResX: 1280
PlayResY: 720
ScaledBorderAndShadow: Yes
ScriptType: v4.00+
Title:
WrapStyle: 0
YCbCr Matrix: None
[Kdenlive Extradata]
MaxLayer: 0
DefaultStyles: Default
[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Liberation Sans,1000.00,&H00FFFFFF,&H0000FFFF,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100.00,100.00,0.00,0.00,1,1.00,1.00,2,10,10,10,1
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,00:00:17.07,00:00:26.80,Default,,0,0,0,,{\i1\c&H6f72ff&}Командир флота далеков вызывает\Nвсе временны́е корабли далеков.{\c}{\i0}
Yet Project Monitor still displays them as it did before.
If I paste the .ass file you show above into a file and then import it into a new empty project as a new subtitle track, I see exactly what I’d expect from what’s in it.
Absolutely enormous text that only fits 2 and a bit characters into the whole monitor.
(1000pt font size is stupidly big, at 150pt at that script resolution it fills the whole screen).
So now I’m even less sure what’s special about your system or what you’re doing.
Maybe try a different font and less crazy font sizes?
I choose 1000 only for demonstration, for comparison. It’s obvious that something is wrong when such a big font size is displayed as small (see screenshot above).
I decided to try to reproduce what you did: I created a new project, imported my subtitles file. And I saw what you’d saw. Then I decided to recreate my entire project, and all is alright now. If I change font size, changes are visible in Project Monitor. I guess my old project (created more than a year ago) was incompatible with current version of Kdenlive.
Thank you very much: your answers helped me.
Ok, so I guess that rules out something about your system font rendering, or an overflow with the font size that large too …
If you do manage to figure out what is different between the old and new projects, I’d definitely be keen to know. The conversion from SRT to ASS was a bit of a leap, but we do have code explicitly for updating old project files when they are opened in new kdenlive versions, and doing that is supposed to work. So if there’s bugs in that and we can find a way to reproduce them, they are definitely worth fixing.
Ok, with the benefit of some sleep, and the debugging my head quietly does in it - it seems like the most probable thing here is that your original project somehow became desynchronised with the working copy in /tmp (which is what we normally tell MLT to render in the monitor).
I’m not sure offhand yet how that happened - but if at some point before seeing the problem you restored this from a backup, or a crash, there are some complicated interactions going on there in the current code which might mess this up in certain circumstances … Is there any chance you had two instances of kdenlive open to the same project as well?
But if that was the case, then trouble with changing the style was something of a red herring. And would suggest that changing anything (the text or position or number of subtitle clips) also wouldn’t have shown up in the monitor - or if it did, should have ‘fixed’ the problem.
So the other interesting test to run would have been to stop kdenlive, remove any stale .ass or .srt files from /tmp then restart it and see if you had subtitles visible in the monitor at all, let alone being able to change them.
Either way though, if you still have the original project file, could you please open a bug report and attach it there. We don’t need any of the resources to be able to actually render it, I’d just like to look at how the subtitle state was recorded in there.
