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Vibe Kinetic listens to your sequence, picks the sentences worth putting on screen, art-directs them (typography, colour, animation, word-level highlights) and renders each one as an animated clip with a transparent background, placed automatically on your timeline. It is not a subtitle tool. It writes short on-screen hooks — the punchline, the number, the payoff — the way a motion designer would, not a word-for-word transcript. Works in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

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Quick Start

1

Open the tool

Open the Tools Menu and select Vibe Kinetic.
2

Pick a style preset (optional)

Click a card in Style presets — it fills the Brief box with a ready-made style description you can then edit.
3

Write or adjust the brief

Describe the look and the editorial intent in plain language. Leave it empty for the clean default look.
4

Set density and duration

Texts per minute = how many captions appear. Seconds on screen = how long each one stays.
5

Run

Click Generate captions. The run modal shows four steps: audio export, curation, render, placement.
You need a saved project and an active sequence with audio. The tool reads the whole sequence, not just the part around the playhead.

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What you get on the timeline

Each caption arrives as its own video clip with alpha, stacked above your footage and cut to the exact in/out point the AI chose.
These are rendered clips, not Essential Graphics / Text layers. You can move, trim, delete or re-order them freely, but you cannot retype the text inside Premiere or Resolve. To change wording or style, adjust the brief and run again.
Rendered files are written to the download folder before import, so you keep a copy of every clip.

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Main Settings

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Texts per minute

This is a target density, not a quota. The AI reasons in ideas, so it will only place a caption where there is something worth highlighting — a quiet or repetitive passage will get fewer.

2–5

Sparse, editorial. Long-form, interviews, documentary, corporate.

6–9

Balanced. YouTube talking-head, tutorials, podcasts clips. Start here.

10–15

Dense, high-energy. Reels, TikTok, Shorts, fast-cut promos.
Above 15 a caption would live less than four seconds on screen and nobody can read it — that’s why the slider stops there.

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Seconds on screen

This is the target duration. A caption is automatically shortened when the next one arrives sooner, and captions that would end up too short to be readable are dropped rather than flashed.
  • 2–3 s — punchy, rhythmic, matches fast dense edits. Best default.
  • 4–6 s — the viewer has time to read a longer line. Good for stats, quotes, definitions.
  • 7–10 s — near-permanent lower third. Only useful at very low density, otherwise captions collide and get trimmed anyway.
Density and duration interact. High density + long duration = the duration wins on paper but gets clipped in practice. If you want long-lived captions, lower the density.

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Advanced Settings

Advanced is off by default, and that is a real mode — not just hidden fields.

Advanced OFF

The AI art-directs everything: it derives the palette and the mood from what is actually being said, varies placement per caption, and uses a font auto-detected on your machine.

Advanced ON

Your palette, your placement and your font pool are respected. The AI still composes hierarchy, highlights and animation — but inside your constraints.

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Color palette

Four slots, plus five ready-made palettes.
Fill Primary + Secondary and leave the rest empty if you only care about “white text, one brand-coloured keyword”. Filling all four does not make the result busier — it just gives the art director more room.
Legibility is protected automatically: a colour that would vanish on its own background gets corrected. If your exact brand hex comes back slightly adjusted, that is why — pair it with a panel/box in the brief to keep it untouched.

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Placement

For vertical social exports, Center or Top is usually safer: platform UI (captions, username, buttons) covers the bottom of the frame.

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Fonts

The dropdown lists the fonts installed on your machine, and the exact font file is sent to the renderer so what you see is what you get. You can add up to 3.
  • 1 font — the safest, most coherent result.
  • 2 fonts — enables pairing: a small lead-in line in one face and a big payoff line in another. This is what makes a caption look designed rather than typed.
  • 3 fonts — extra material for the art director to choose from; useful when you’re not sure which one fits your footage.
Typography stays consistent across the whole video: whatever the AI settles on for the first captions is applied to all of them, so the look never drifts halfway through. Multiple fonts create contrast inside a caption (line 1 vs line 2), not a different font every five seconds.
Pick a heavy display or condensed face for the payoff line and a regular sans for the lead-in. Pairing two similar sans faces produces contrast so weak it reads as a mistake.

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Download folder

Defaults to your project folder (marked project). Change it if your project lives on a slow network drive — rendering writes one file per caption, and a fast local disk keeps import snappy. Reset puts it back to the project folder.

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Writing a Good Brief

The brief is read as art direction, so describe what you want to see, not what you want the tool to do.

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What works

  • The container: “Put every caption on a solid white rounded card with generous padding and a soft shadow.”
  • The typography: “Bold white uppercase condensed text, tight tracking, sentence case for the lead-in.”
  • The composition: “Exactly two lines: a small lowercase lead-in, then a payoff about twice the size, lines almost touching.”
  • The motion: “Words rise one by one with a gentle ease-out, no scale change, no rotation.”
  • The restraint: “No outline, no glow, no tilt, nothing else on screen.”
  • The editorial intent: “Only highlight actionable advice and numbers. Skip pleasantries and transitions.”
  • The tone of the words: “Rewrite what I say into short punchy hooks, never full sentences.”

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What doesn’t work

  • A manual list of timecodes or exact sentences — the AI chooses the moments itself from what is said. If you already know the exact texts and timings, use the Copilot instead (see below).
  • Asking for more or fewer captions — that’s the Texts per minute slider.
  • Asking for a longer display time — that’s the Seconds on screen slider.
  • Asking for a font you didn’t select — only fonts installed and picked in Advanced are available.
  • Asking for images, logos, icons or video inside a caption — the engine renders type, panels and effects, nothing else.
  • Vague vibes alone (“make it cool”) — you’ll get the default look. Name a colour, a weight, a shape, a motion.
“[Container]. [Typography and case]. [Composition / number of lines]. [Motion and rhythm]. [What to avoid]. [What to highlight editorially].”
Example:
“No box. Bold white uppercase condensed text in the lower third with a very discreet halo. One line only, never stacked. Words rise gently one by one, no scale, no rotation. Highlight only numbers and product names in a saturated accent. Nothing else on screen.”
Start from a style preset, run once, then edit two or three words of the brief and run again. Iterating on a working brief beats writing a perfect one from scratch.

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Style Presets

Clicking a preset only fills the brief box — nothing is locked. Edit it, merge two of them, or delete half a sentence.

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Using Vibe Kinetic from the Copilot

You can also ask the Copilot in chat to place animated text — it uses the same engine, but skips transcription and curation because you supply the words.
“Add kinetic text: ‘ONLY 3 STEPS’ at 4s, ‘STEP ONE’ at 9s, ‘STEP TWO’ at 15s — Apple style, white on two lines, 3 seconds each.”
What you can specify in the request:
Ask for a font by name and you’ll get the closest real match, never a missing-font error. If nothing close is installed, a sane built-in face is used instead.

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Common Pitfalls

  • No sequence audio → nothing to analyse, no captions. The panel path needs a spoken track.
  • Project not saved → the download folder falls back to your temp directory; rendered clips still import, but they’re stored outside your project.
  • Too dense + too long → captions overlap and get trimmed or dropped. Lower the density before raising the duration.
  • All four palette slots set to near-identical colours → highlights become invisible. Keep one clearly contrasting accent.
  • Advanced ON with no font selected → the Generate button stays disabled. Pick at least one font.
  • Very long sequences take a while: one clip is rendered per caption. A one-hour interview at 8/min is roughly 500 clips.
Recommended starting point for a talking-head social edit: pick White Pairing or Cinematic, density 8, duration 2 s, Advanced ON with one condensed display font plus one regular sans, placement Center for vertical / Bottom for horizontal.