
I needed to add some english subtitles to all my spanish recorded voices, so my english speaking friends could get something of the story. At this point I had all my sound editing stuff for the 2D animatic done in Cinelerra which was really nice and easy to do. So, how to add subtitles there ?
I’ll show you a trick I’ve learned from Jason van Gumster in Cinelerra mailing list (yeah, we’re old pals !)
One of Cinelerra most exciting features is the ability to keyframe everything. So what we do here is the following:

First we select the whole movie strip (I have one image list with all frames rendered) and from the Resources window we drag a Video Effect called Title and drop it on the selected strip. This adds an effect subtrack, right below the original track.
Now we can type the needed text choosing location, font size, colour, etc. We can also add motion effects like scrolling text and all but that’s another story. But what happens when we want the text to change along the timeline ? Shall we add another Title effect ? Nop.

We have to activate the “Key” mode, (the little key icon on the toolbar) first. Then we just scrub to the desired point for our “new” text, and enter the Title effect settings again. Here we delete previous text and type some new text. As we do this, we’ll see a “key” icon is drawn over the effect strip. Now if we move in the timeline again we’ll see the text changing where the key was inserted !
And that’s it. We can go adding keyframes for the text this way and write all our subtitles, we can change size, font and colour even, motion, and many details in each keyframe.
Isn’t that great ?