Change default subtitle style

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1

Hi, I’m on Debian bookworm, using kdenlive 25.08.1

My question is: how can I change the default style of subtitles?

Thanks for your advice.

2

Hello and welcome to the forum.
I think a good entry point in subtitle style is this documentation page: Subtitles — Kdenlive Manual 25.08 documentation

3

Thanks for pointing this out! I understand “You cannot move or delete the style Default.”

But: can I change the default style? Or, as a workaround, can I store a modified style somewhere, so that it’s at hand for any new project?

4

You can share styles between projects.

In project A:

  • Create as many subtitle styles as you need.
  • Save the project.
  • In the directory where you project is saved, you will now find a file called your-project-name.kdenlive.ass
  • Open that file with a text editor
  • Right below where it says [V4+ Styles], that’s where the styles you just created are defined.
  • Copy that section only to your clipboard.

In project B where you want to reuse your subtitles:

  • Activate subtitles in the project and add a dummy subtitle.
  • Save the project.
  • Go to the .kdenlive.ass file associated to the B project.
  • Paste what you just copied below [V4+ Styles]. Make sure the “Default“ style is not present twice though.
  • Close project B.
  • Open project B

This should work.

5

As a bonus, if it’s hard to change the style of all your subtitle clips at once for whatever reason, you can always access the .kdenlive.ass file and find the actual subtitle date at the bottom. You can either do something like find+replace (for example, find “Default“, replace with “My-Style“), or load it into a spreadsheet program since its in CSV format, or even write a script.

6

Thank you, very helpful! A working variation is:

  • style a model-projects sub as you like
  • save the project
  • edit the saved '*.ass file: delete everything from [Events]
  • use this trucated file as a starter *.ass file in any new project of the same dimensions
7

I’d probably do that in the opposite direction. ie. Start a new project however you like, and then after you save it and create the .ass, you can edit it and paste in whatever other styles you like.

You can either change the ‘default’ style, or add one with a different name (and set that as the ‘default’ to use). ASS allows you to define an arbitrary number of styles that you can choose from as you wish for each clip or part of clip.

In the new subtitle code I’m working on the arbitrary restriction on changing or deleting the style named ‘Default’ is removed (that’s not fundamental to ASS), and we support managing a true ‘global’ style library for sharing styles between projects.

8

This is a valid (and with the current code, sometimes necessary) workaround for certain things the current UI doesn’t give you a direct or easy way to do.

As long as it remains a valid ASS file, we don’t really care who created it or how. But I would recommend that if you are going to do this, you save your project and exit kdenlive, then restart it again after your manual editing.

The actual handling is a little tricky, while kdenlive is running there are two copies of the .ass - there’s the project files which get updated when you save, and loaded when you open a project. But there’s also a ‘working’ copy which contains your unsaved changes and is what gets rendered during playback (and restored from during crash recovery). So there is some risk of confusion/corruption/loss of work if you edit it manually while kdenlive is using it.

My list of irks with the current subtitle code are here: 24.12.0 subtitle editing and I’m working on fixing them, so feel free to follow up there with any of your own you’d like addressed too.

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