How to update .prmi sidecar files

Question

Adobe and Community, please help me out:
 
I am working on creating a database of video clips, all of which have audio narration. The goal of this database is to have associated transcripts to act as metadata for the video clips. The Adobe Premiere transcription feature seems like a silver bullet at first glance, but it has two major flaws. First, the .prmi is not editable, meaning one cannot simply open it up to fix bad transcriptions. Second, editing the transcription on Premiere does not update the .prmi file - the corrections are only stored with the project they are in. So the database will keep the original bad transcriptons. Also, I ALREADY have transcription of all the clips even before the .prmi is created, so it would be ideal If I could feed these transcripts to Premiere so it doesn't have to generate a transcription from scratch (with errors). If anyone has a solution for this workflow, they would be my hero! Possible solutions would be:
1. A way to open .prmi files and replace the transcription with the known correct transcriptions.
2. Edit transcriptions in Premire and have the update the .prmi file (P.S. - I tried all the options available in Premiere and tried clearing cache, but no new .prmi files were created with the edited transcription)
3. A way to have .prmi generated with transcription that I provide.
 
Thank you for any help!

mattchristensen · Answer

Hi @defaultoqspuc1ry65v I'll do my best to clear things up. The .prmi file is intended to be a cache of exactly what Premiere Pro's media analyzers (for visual search or transcription) produce. This way if the media is re-used, Premiere Pro doesn't have to re-do the computationally expensive analyses. For what you're trying to do, let's set aside the .prmi as it's not going to get where you want to go.

The source of truth for transcription data for a project is always inside the project file itself. Any edits you make to it are stored there, and not written back to the .prmi. We do support import and export of transcript data in the Text panel. For example, you can:

Transcribe in Premiere Pro
In the Text panel, click "..." > Export and export the transcript as TXT
Edit the transcript in a text editor outside of Premiere Pro
In the Text panel, click "..." > Import correct transcript
The corrected transcript is now the transcript attached to that clip

However, if you import a transcript in this format without Step 1 transcribing in Pr, you won't get word-accurate Text-Based Editing, because the transcript you import doesn't have that granularity.

As Stan mentioned, we have in Beta a new JSON-based format which isn't human-readable like a TXT, but importantly does support word-level timecodes. The idea here is that if you can translate your external transcript into this format, you can now ingest that into Premiere Pro and skip our built-in transcription entirely, if you like. We are working with third parties to build this into their transcription tools so that eventually you won't have to do the translation on your own.

So, given all that, here's how I'd answer your questions:

1. This isn't how .prmi are designed to work, and won't happen.

2. You can edit the transcriptions in Premiere, and then export the transcript for external use, or to re-import into future Premiere Pro projects. Either use the existing ".prtranscript" format in the Export menu, or the new "JSON" format in the Beta. It just won't have anything to do with the .prmi

3. Not going to be possible.

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