Caption tool disrespects "multiline/single line" and "word frequency" settings

​​@Untold Entertainment Inc. 

I’m curious whether the newish single word captions helped your workflow? It was a major step forward, and leaves native animation of captions the big feature that is needed.

But users still want more precise control over captions. But, as you identified before, some oddities are due to the dynamic relationship between font and font size and the caption parameters. You suggested an auto-font-size adjustment. I think a feature to consider is to flag a caption that does not comply with the parameters set (as was done with closed captions). While stepping through the exceptions, you could make manual changes, or click a checkbox to elect an option to reduce font size to comply with single line, or an option to widen the bounding box to prevent wrapping to a second line.

​@justaneditor123 ​@real_5081 ​@JohnToretto For you recent posters who may not have waded through this thread, the single word caption feature introduced in PR 26.3 provided a tidy way to get single words. Before that, it was impossible to avoid multiple words on one line no matter how you tweaked the parameters.

If you are trying to get more control over caption creation to reduce manual edits, keep in mind the relationship between font, font size, the bounding box, and the caption creation parameters.

I don’t think much of this has changed since the discussion here. For example, I just tested in PR 26.5.1 on Win 11. I transcribed a 1920x1080 clip and created a sequence. The clip is a professional voice over, so the speed of speech is not super fast. I created captions using the default Subtitle settings, modified to be Single Line, 72 character max,1.2 second minimum duration, and zero gap. I used the Adobe default Lucida Console font at size 48. There are 68 captions, and all but two are single line.

The two that went to a second caption line were only 50 characters. In the Text panel/Caption tab those 2 are single line, the result of the program’s calculations. But the font size/bounding box size have wrapped them to a secnd line.

One workaround is to change the max characters. If I use 50 instead of 72, neither of those lines goes to double. To test that further, I created a single caption with numbers, so I could easily see how many characters there are. I made it 72 characters. I would have to reduce Lucida to 33 font size, small but not unreadable on a large screen. If I change to Helvetica Pro Bold or Arial Regular I can increase the 72 characters font size to 37 on one line, and it is better. If I manually increase the bounding box to 90% of the screen, I can increase the Helvetica size to 45.

Caption text wraps because it is "paragraph" text, not “point text.” If the "caption length" calculated by the algorithm is wider than the bounding box, it wraps to another line.  The default box size appears to be 75% of screenwidth, but you can manually expand it to 90%.

Stan

Almost 2027 and this BS is still a problem. Premiere pro 26.5.1 still refuses to respect single line selection. So freaking frustrating.

This is only part of the issue, but be aware that Single Word Captions are now supported in release 26.3.0. As noted in the staff response in this thread, they have heard the need for animations:

I created a tutorial for the single word creation (the first minute) and continue with one option for a simple animation.

Stan

PLS ADD THIS

The whole subtitle/captioning workflow is terrible. There's no way a "professional" subscription app should be falling behind free options like this. 

Hi @alex_3717 . Yes, it's that "auto-grouping" you mention that's causing all the problems. Your workaround, unfortunately, isn't really a workaround: whether i'm fine-tuning the transcript word-by-word, or fine-tuning the captions word-by-word on the other end, the result is the same: i'm spending a bunch of time fussing over it, when robots are perfectly capable of doing it FOR me.

Hello @10906925 Entertainment Inc,

I completely get your frustration, caption generation should be predictable, especially when you’ve precisely set all the preferences. From what I’ve seen (both in video editing workflows and even lightweight text rendering in mobile gaming apps like endless runners), the root issue often isn't the UI settings, but how Premiere internally clusters spoken phrases during transcription.

Even with the sliders at minimum and "Single" line enforced, Premiere's speech-to-text engine still does some auto-grouping based on timing and phonetic flow, not just character count. It tries to avoid captions feeling too choppy for viewers, but that definitely clashes with setups where you want hyper-granular control (like word-by-word breakdowns). I run into similar headaches when trying to auto-generate subtitles for in-game cutscenes, sometimes the "AI" decides two short words sound better grouped, even if technically they shouldn't.

There’s a workaround (though tedious): manually adjusting the segmentation during the transcript phase before creating captions gives you finer control. Still not ideal when you’re aiming for a true "set and forget" workflow, but it does help minimize post-generation cleanup.

Hoping Adobe improves this with a future update, because you’re right, it feels like a basic expectation when you dial in the settings so precisely.
- Alex

@Francis-Crossman17221443,

Thanks for giving this topic attention. The new caption workflow, speech to text, and text-based editing have moved ahead steadily since their introduction. Fabulous, work-saving features. And there's lots more to do.

I agree with the proposals as good next steps.

@Untold Entertainment Inc., I'll respond to your comments later; I need to do some tests first.

@Francis-Crossman17221443, issues involved in Ryan's comments are limitations to the caption text boxes, wrapping, etc.

The proposed changes are more flexible, but I'll comment on an additional option of a "Single Word" setting for captions. It has value in being a more intuitive process than "if you want single word captions, use max characters 1, min duration 0.25, and single line." It differs when the single word length would be less than the minimum duration. I personally don't have a problem with "I do" versus "I" and "do," if they are spoken so quickly it won't fit the quarter of a second. But there are some creators doing some crazy stuff!

Also, plug-ins must currently use caption creation as part of their animated workflows. There is no scripting support to access the transcription itself, only captions. More scripting access may be on the roadmap, but it will not happen soon. As long as a caption is at least one FRAME in length, it may have value.

> The ultimate request here, I think, is to have robust animated captions that can do word-by-word animation so you don't have to mess around with plugins. We have heard that request loud and clear.

Excellent!

Stan

Thanks so much for your attention on this, Francis. 

Yes, i think reducing the time spoken will help. But the reason this behaviour is jumping out to me loud and clear as a bug is that even when my speaker rattles off a litany of words very quickly, the tool seems to be able to keep up. It seems to be only certain phrases that combine words (for example, the words "in the comments"). But maybe that's just my observer bias?  

SETTINGS PRIORITY

i'm still unsure why the engineers believe that reducing the tool to recognize a maximum of 1 character would fix the issue though? The current lowest setting for "maximum length in characters" is 7 characters. 

In my mysterious example, the words "in the comments," which Premiere Pro regularly combines into a single caption, are each delineated by a space. The tool recognized each word just fine when it wrote them out. But it chose to put all three words in the same, single caption, despite clearly being able to determine that those are three distinct words that are separated by a space. So if we're investigating the tool's rules, it would appear that the "minimum duration in seconds" setting may be overriding, or taking precedence, over the "maximum length in characters" setting. 

i'm just scrubbing through my most recent project now, looking at the captions. In one moment, my speaker says "I got one word for you." The tool has divided these words up like so: "I got / one / word / for / you," deciding to put the two words" I got" into a single caption. 

What is the tool "thinking"?  You might say that "I got" is too short for it to detect as two separate words, so it put both of those words into a single caption. But "I got" has a space in the middle, and the tool knows that. Further, the words "got," "one," "for," and "you" are all identically sized 3-letter words, and only "got" is paired up with a second word. Those words are all under the tool's supposed minimum 7 character "max" limit — there should be no functional difference between any of them, from a computer's perspective.

In another project, the tool had no trouble isolating the words "I" and "a," both single-letter words, into their own caption. So the bug (and i'm still calling it a bug, though i suspect that doing so changes your development priorities?) seems to be that despite the user choosing a maximum character limit, the tool ignores that setting, and really only cares about the time it thinks the speaker is taking to utter a phrase.

If that's the case, perhaps in the case of a slurred phrase where the tool hears "in the comments" but can't quite tell where each word begins and ends, instead of just giving up and putting all the words into a single caption, it can split the difference and carve up that caption, dividing that space evenly so that "in," "the," and "comments" are evenly distributed?  i would much prefer very slightly inaccurate timing to the tool just ignoring my settings and putting multiple words in one caption.

As for the font size being too large to display on a single line, here's where i think that the software can be reasonably expected to do more heavy lifting than it is currently doing. 

FONT SIZE AND LINE OVERFLOW

Let's say the engineering adjusts the feature. The user can now choose "maximum characters: 1" and "minumum duration in seconds: 0," along with "Single lines" (instead of "Double lines") But then the user, from the same prompt, chooses a caption style with an enormous font. Those first three settings are what likely matters most to that user: one word at a time, each word on a single line.  So if the caption is the word "AND," and the user has chosen a gigantic font size that forces the tool to put each letter on a different line:

A
N
D

... a computer knows this. It knows the font is too large to contain that word on a single line like the user requested. The computer knows the word will overflow, because the computer is the one drawing the caption!

So if we're talking about priority override of certain settings, my expectation here would be that Permiere Pro's got my back: it will resize that caption for me, reducing the font size to the maximum size possible so that the word "AND" still fits on a single line, exactly like i requested (despite me being kind of a dumb user and choosing a font that's too large). This is not the tool's rules conflicting: this is the tool providing what the user has asked for from the tool's own settings prompt.

Here's how that plays out more practically, with a personal example: i like to use a big, chunky font for my single-word captions on my TikTok videos about board games. As long as everything is broken up into single words (which it's not, due to the bug), those captions all fit on a single line 99% of the time.  But very occasionally, the caption will say "BOARDGAMEGEEK.COM."  That single, 17-charcter long word is too wide for my settings. Because of that, i have to scrub carefully through the timeline and find all of the places where my speaker has spoken that url, and then adjust the font size down so that it fits on a single line. 

But i don't use Adobe software to make my life more difficult. i want things to be as easy and seamless aas possible. The computer knows ahead of time, while creating the captions, that certain captions have overflow issues. i would prefer the tool to correct those issues FOR me — even if it slows down the caption creation process. Because as slow as it is, it can't possibly be slower than me picking through the timeline and correcting each and every caption by hand. And if you're worried that some users won't want the tool to resize their caption font sizes like that, you simply put the power to decide in the hands of your users, by exposing a checkmark that says "Automatically resize overflowing captions." 

Otherwise, the net result is that i choose "Single line," and Premier Pro says "Forget you — i'm making it double lines." The software directly contradicts what the user is trying to do. And like i said before, if you expose a button that says "green," and the user clicks it and the thing turns red instead, we're not in "feature request" territory. That's a bug. 🙂

- Ryan