Animated captions that mean something
Animated captions are captions whose movement carries information. A word set larger because it is the point, a line that lands hard because the sentence lands hard. Most tools animate every caption identically, which is decoration. Ymotion picks the movement from what the words are doing.
The movement is chosen, not applied
There are 59 entrances in Ymotion. A caption can rise, slam, unblur, glitch, cascade, drift, settle, or fifty-two other things. What matters is that nothing picks one at random and nothing applies the same one to every video.
Every entrance is described on the same axes: what it feels like, what energy it carries, which content it suits. Those descriptions are embedded. When you caption a clip, the transcript is described on those same axes and the nearest entrance is the one you get. A video about a hard month does not arrive with a bounce.
Emphasis comes from meaning, not grammar
Every word is rated for how much of the point it carries. The test is not whether the sentence still parses without it. It is whether the speaker is still saying the same thing.
Drop "was" from "he was a gangster" and the grammar breaks while the meaning is untouched, so it rates low. Drop "gangster" and the grammar survives and the point is gone, so it rates high. The high word is what gets the size, the weight and the colour.
Motion the way an editor keys it
Every movement leaves from rest, accelerates, and decelerates into its landing. the curve After Effects calls Easy Ease. The alternative, and what most caption tools use, starts at full speed on the first frame and coasts. That is the shape of a button responding to a tap, and it is why a lot of auto-captioned video reads as software rather than as edited.
Questions
- What are animated captions?
- Captions that move as they appear, rather than cutting on and off. Done well the movement carries meaning such as emphasis, pace and the shape of a question, not just visual interest.
- Do animated captions help retention?
- Movement holds attention, but only while it is telling you something. A caption that arrives differently for no reason becomes noise by the tenth one, which is why Ymotion varies the entrance within a family rather than across the whole vocabulary.
- Can I change the animation Ymotion picked?
- Yes. Every choice is a control in the panel, and everything the design decided is editable keyframes rather than a sealed preset. The model may only choose what a person can choose.