Closed Captions disappear or change after save, shutdown and restart

Question

I'm using Premiere Pro 14.1.0 (Build 116); running Mac OS 10.13.3 on a late 2011 MacBook Pro 17-inch, with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, and 10 gigs of memory, 1333HHz DDR3. The Graphic Card is AMD Radeon HD 6770 1024 MG and Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB.

For the last five months, I've had very frustrating and time-consuming problems with captions.

I shoot, direct and edit documentaries in the Maasai and Swahili languages. On my current video, I have 25 hours of rushes with 32,000 lines of subtitles. I create the subtitles in InqScribe 2.2, export them as .srt files. I have imported these files into 50 scenes, i.e., 50 Premiere projects. An .srt file of captions may contain between 200 and 2000 captions for one scene.

In Closed Captions Display, I have Standard at CEA-608 and Stream at CC1. In the Caption Stream, I select all of each scene's captions, set the Background Color to 0%, set the Text and Edge colors as I want them, set the Size to 60, the Edge to 2, leave Line Spacing at 50 and click the lower middle square of the Caption Block. I then switch to Effects, drag and drop "Drop Shadow" into the Caption clip on the timeline; switch back to Editing, double click the Caption clip, select Effect Control in the Source window, go back to Editing and set Drop Shadow opacity to 97%, leaving Direction, Distance and the other choices at the default.

When I save and quit the project, I have about a 50% chance the next time I open it hat the subtitles will be the way I left them. When the subtitles are not the way I left them, they are wrong in one of two ways. In the first way, they are simply invisible, although the Track Output is not blinded, and the selections in the Caption Stream are exactly as I left them when I quit before. In the second way, the captions are visible, my selections in the Caption Stream are again exactly as I left them, but in the Program window the Background Color has switched to 100% black and the font size appears to be about 18. (See attached screen grabs for a comparison.)

In either of these two cases, I have found only one way to return my captions to visible and the settings I want them to have. That way is to delete the .srt captions file from the Project Window, re-import it from my hard drive, and manually reset all the caption settings again.

I have not learned how to Import and Export Caption settings, but even with that time saver, the problems of reloading and tweaking .srt files are time-wasting and frustrating.

Any help will be appreciated.

Stan Jones · Answer

The first problem is the one most reported, except that it usually appears while editing, not upon reopening. In that problem, the "actual" caption content is correct in the Caption Panel, but is not in sync with what appears (or is simply not visible in the Program and Source Monitors). And your variation may be different than this. The second problem is reported less often, but appears to be losing the basic style settings from the caption stream.

You are experiencing both problems intermittently, which makes them difficult to troubleshoot. And in the end, we might conclude they are bugs and there is nothing to be done but find a workaround - as you have.

Here a possible way to explore further. When you next have a bad project opening (either problem), do NOT save the just reopened project. Do a "save as" with a new name. So you now have "MyProject.prproj" (the last good save) and "MyProjectBad.prproj" (the new save as with caption wrong in one of the two ways. To research this further, I would only need those two prproj files - none of the media or caption files.

I think it is worth a try at catching the problem. I'll send you an email so you can send me a link to a dropbox file.

Stan

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