Is there a way to manually add a missing line to a transcript at a specific time?

Question

Sometimes Premiere completely misses a line of dialogue, and I can’t figure out how to add it at the correct time.

For example, someone says “That actually worked!” with several seconds of silence before and after it. Premiere recognizes the surrounding dialogue but skips that line entirely. There isn’t even a […] placeholder where it belongs—it’s just missing.

I can hear the words and mark exactly where they start and end with In/Out points. Is there a way to tell Premiere, “These words were spoken in this range,” and add them to the source transcript in the text-based editing tool?

Adding the words to a neighboring transcript segment doesn’t work properly because the nearest recognized dialogue is several seconds away. I want the missing line to be searchable and usable for text-based editing, with the correct timing.

Am I missing an option, or does this currently require exporting, editing, and reimporting the transcript? If there isn’t a direct way to do it, could Adobe add one?

CORCTON34033231 · Accepted Answer

Yes — no exporting/reimporting needed. Open the Text panel (Window > Text), go to the Transcript tab, and click the pencil icon to switch to Edit transcript mode.

Click in the transcript at the spot where the missed line belongs — park the playhead where the line starts to help you find the right place — and simply type the missing words. The added words land at that position in the transcript. Click Done when finished.

Two things to know:

- The words are placed at the transcript position you typed them into; they won't be frame-aligned to your In/Out marks automatically. If you need exact timing for delivery, generate captions from the transcript (… > Create captions from transcript) and nudge that caption's In/Out in the Captions tab.

- Once the transcript is corrected, text-based editing and transcript search will include the added line.

Stan Jones · Answer

@@WeiszCracksI agree with the described workaround as the best option for you.First, what you have should not happen. Recent bugs have involved “wildly” inaccurate transcriptions and no transcription, but to omit a line of dialogue is odd. Do you see more than one instance of this problem? More than one clip? What version of PR are you using?Mac or PC?Second, what I think you will see in the transcript tab is words occurring evenly spaced out over the time to the next begin time. And this is what captions will do. I tested adding the text at the beginning of the next segment, and it is definitely what you do not want. All the words are spaced evenly, but within a tiny bit of time.If you use text-based editing to select text with the icon on for “automatically selectin/out points,” it will select your added text section, but it will use PR’s positions that will be inaccurate to some degree.Third, Adobe shared the .json template for the transcripts, and there, seconds are divided into decimal fractions. And they are set per WORD with a start time and duration. A pause is the amount left over from the calculation: [next word start time] - [current word start time] - duration. But since the missing text was not “heard,” it fills all the available space before the next start time.Stan

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