Update #28: The new Visual Editor — five new functions for your translations

Dubly hands you a finished translation: text, voice, timing and lip movement already work together, with nothing for you to configure. For the vast majority of videos that is the whole job — upload, pick a language, download the result.

Even so, the same request kept coming back from you: the ability to adjust individual moments yourself. Landing a line exactly on a particular shot. Sharpening a phrase for the target market. Adding a remark the original never had. That is what the visual editor is for.

It lays your translated video out as a timeline. Every spoken line sits in it as its own block — a segment — that you can grab, move and change on its own. And you get to hear every change before it reaches the finished video.

What you can do now

• Drag a line to exactly where it should sit against the picture
• Have a line spoken faster or slower, without it starting to sound unnatural
• Split lines apart, add new ones, or leave single ones out
• Use lip movement only where someone is actually speaking on screen
• Rewrite a single line, have it re-voiced, and listen to it right away
• Try anything and take it back — nothing reaches the video until you approve it

1. Where to find the editor

The visual editor is a third view of the editor you already know — the other two are unchanged.

2. Putting a line exactly where it belongs

This is where most of the new control sits. You see every line as a block at the point where it is spoken, with the video playing above it. The space bar starts and stops playback.

Move it. Drag a block to where you want it — so a line lands right on a cut, for instance, or only starts once something appears on screen. You drag freely, with nothing snapping into place; only the neighbouring lines limit you.

Make it longer or shorter. Grab a block by its edge and pull. The line gets more or less time, and is spoken more slowly or more quickly to match.

Set the pace directly. When you want to be precise, a slider sets the speaking pace. It only lets you go as far as the voice still sounds natural — anything beyond that, you would hear. As you drag, the editor shows you how long the line currently runs.

3. Splitting, adding and leaving out lines

Sometimes it is not about length but about where the lines are cut. Maybe you want to split a long block in two so you can place the halves separately. Maybe the target market needs something the original never said. Maybe a passage should simply go.

4. Lip movement where it counts

Below the lines sits a second track for lip movement. Until now your choice applied to the whole video; now you can see which moments are affected and switch them on or off individually.

It is worth doing, because lip movement only makes a difference where someone is speaking on screen. Over product shots, slides or landscape footage it changes nothing you can see — so you can safely leave it out there.

5. Changing the words and voice of a single line

Selecting a line opens a detail panel to the right of the timeline. Everything that concerns that one line lives there:

• The original text — change it and a fresh translation is made from it.
• The translation — or write the line yourself, exactly as you want it.
• The pace — the same slider as above, resettable to the original value at any time.
• The voice — when several people speak in the video, assign a different one to this line.
• The lip movement — the switch for this moment alone.

One click on Regenerate segment applies your change. You can then listen to the new recording straight away and compare it with the original — with nothing happening to the rest of the video.

6. How your changes reach the video

While you work, your finished video stays untouched. A bar at the bottom counts what you have changed and leaves you two ways out:

• Re-render takes everything and rebuilds the video. It runs for a few minutes; afterwards the editor swaps in the finished video by itself.
• Discard puts everything back the way it was.

Until then you can experiment freely: every step can be undone, and if you leave the editor with unsaved changes, Dubly asks first.

If you like working quickly, every action has a keyboard shortcut too — space to play, S to split, N for a new line, L for lip movement and ⌘Z to undo.

Tell us what's missing

The editor exists because you asked for it — and the interesting cases only show up with your real videos. If a setting you need is missing, or something does not work the way you expect: message us in the app chat, or reply to the newsletter. We read every answer.