If you've ever spent an hour manually typing out Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, or Bengali captions word by word — timing each one by hand, fixing the same spelling twice, exporting, and realizing the timing's off anyway — you already know the problem Kalakar was built to solve.

Most captioning tools are built for English first, and everything else feels bolted on. Kalakar flips that. It's made by Desi creators, for Desi creators, which means the whole workflow — captions, styling, even audio cleanup — is designed around how South Asian editors actually work, not adapted from a tool that wasn't thinking about you in the first place.

This article is your starting point. We'll walk through the homepage, show you how a project is structured, and cover the core tools you'll use on nearly every edit. If you're brand new to Kalakar, read this first — everything else builds on it.

Prefer to watch it instead? This article follows the Kalakar Overview video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SItj2UPLNec) step by step — keep it open alongside this guide, or watch it first and use this as your reference.

The Homepage: What You're Looking At

When you log in for the first time, you'll land on the homepage. Here's what's there:

Recent Projects — every project you've worked on, ready to pick back up.

Storage — how much space your uploaded footage is using. Delete a project's footage and that space is freed back up.

Remaining Time — how many hours of captioning you have left, based on your plan. This is what actually gets used up every time you run captions on a video.

Help & Support — if you hit a bug or get stuck, this connects you directly to the team. No ticket queues to shout into.

Manage Billing — only visible if you're on a paid plan.

There's also a Profile section where you can set your name, phone number, language, and gender. It's a small thing, but worth filling out properly if you're planning to use Kalakar for more than a one-off project.

One quick note on plans: the free version gets you captioning, but the paid plan unlocks a lot more — custom fonts, AI audio cleaning, and more storage and processing time. If you're editing regularly rather than just testing the waters, the paid plan is where Kalakar actually opens up.

Starting a Project

When you create a new project, the first choice is aspect ratio — 16:9 for landscape (YouTube, long-form) or 9:16 for vertical (Reels, Shorts, YouTube Shorts). Each is optimized differently, and we'll go deeper on when to use which in a separate article.

Once you're inside a project, here's the toolset you'll be working with:

Fonts — paid plans only. You can upload your own custom fonts rather than being stuck with defaults, which matters if you've got a brand style to stick to.

Captions — this panel holds every caption in your video. You can edit the text, remove a caption entirely, or fine-tune timing. This is where most of your actual editing time will go, and it deserves its own detailed walkthrough later.

Timeline — lets you scroong through your footage, zoom in and out for precision, and click directly on any caption to jump to it. If you've edited video before, this will feel familiar. If you haven't, you don't actually need it — Kalakar is built to be usable without ever touching the timeline. Delete a caption, add one with Text+, resize it — it's all click-and-go.

Text — full control over styling. Change the words, reposition the caption on screen, even select individual letters to adjust. This is where the fine detail work happens.

Templates — pre-built caption styles you can apply in one click. Kalakar ships with creator-inspired templates, including a popular one-word caption style built by Editing Skool, which has become a favorite for short-form content.

Transitions — apply animated transitions to your captions, with control over how lines and individual words behave differently. Worth exploring once you're comfortable with the basics.

AI Audio: One Button, Cleaner Sound

If your audio came out rough — background noise, inconsistent levels, that slightly muddy sound from a phone mic — Kalakar's AI Audio tool cleans it up in a single click. No manual EQ-ing, no plugins to learn. You click the button, and the audio comes back noticeably crisper. It's a paid-plan feature, but if you're editing audio that wasn't recorded in a treated room, it's one of the more immediately useful tools on offer.

Exporting Your Video

Once you're happy with the edit, it's time to render. Kalakar gives you a few export paths depending on your workflow:

Video — for most creators posting straight to social or YouTube, export as video at 1080p and you're done.

Alpha / SRT — for editors working inside Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve as part of a bigger project, export the captions as an Alpha channel or SRT file to drop directly into your existing timeline.

Note: while you're working inside Kalakar, the preview you see is a low-res version — that's normal, and doesn't reflect your final render quality. We'll cover exactly how rendering quality works in a separate article.

Once your export is done, you'll get a download link — and that's it. Same project, next video, same workflow.

Free vs. Paid, Plainly

So you're not caught off guard later, here's the honest breakdown of what changes between plans:

Free

Captioning — Yes

Custom Fonts — No

AI Audio Cleaning — No

Manage Billing panel — No

Storage & processing time — Lower limits

Paid

Captioning — Yes

Custom Fonts — Yes

AI Audio Cleaning — Yes

Manage Billing panel — Yes

Storage & processing time — Higher limits

If you're just trying Kalakar out on a single video, free will get you a real feel for it. If you're editing regularly, the paid plan is where the tool earns its keep.

What's Next

This overview covers the shape of Kalakar — enough to open a project and get a captioned video out the other end. From here, we'll be publishing deeper walkthroughs on:

9:16 vs. 16:9 — choosing the right format for your platform

Editing captions in depth

How rendering and preview quality actually work

Styling text like a pro

Line vs. word-level caption differences

Exporting Alpha/SRT for professional Premiere and Resolve workflows

Bookmark this page — we'll link each one here as it goes live.