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Participant
January 23, 2022
Answered

Premiere Pro doesn't allow effects on subtitle layer

  • January 23, 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 6353 views

I want to add effects to my subtitles such as a zoom in when it appears or shakiness when the text is in frame, but when I try to add any effects to the subtitle layer, it won't let me. There's no effects window for the subtitle layer, either. I'm very confused by this. It seems it should be simple to add these effects, and I'm not sure why I can't. At the very least I feel that I should be able to convert the subtitles to regular text so I can edit it that way, but there is no way to do that-- I've tried exporting as a .SRT and re-importing but it puts it on the subtitle layer. Any workarounds you've found? I want to put animations on my text without having to manually type out the whole video.

Correct answer andres_1593

guys im a few yeas late hopefully this can help someone but you can drag over your text and click on graphics and titles and then upgrade subtitiles from text to graphics, then you can add effects from there

4 replies

andres_1593Correct answer
Participant
February 17, 2025

guys im a few yeas late hopefully this can help someone but you can drag over your text and click on graphics and titles and then upgrade subtitiles from text to graphics, then you can add effects from there

Participant
February 28, 2025

You can't. Unfortunately, Adobe still hasn't resolved this issue I feel 😞 

Participant
June 30, 2024
Stan Jones
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 30, 2024

This YouTube tutorial uses the "Upgrade Caption to Graphic" feature and adds effects to that. Introduced in the Dec 2022 release (as noted, version 23.1).

 

Stan

 

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 23, 2022

This is a feature request. The new capton workflow changed captions to be non-video items, and no longer subject to effect controls.

 

See this thread:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/faq-workaround-nesting-to-apply-effect-controls-to-caption-track/td-p/11935335

 

This post, in that thread, gives links to two requests related to opacity:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/faq-workaround-nesting-to-apply-effect-controls-to-caption-track/m-p/12694869#M390987

 

There are also posts that discuss converters to make PR captions into xml that can be imported as essential graphics text.

 

Stan

 

Community Expert
January 23, 2022

Instead of subtitles, use an Essential Graphic text layer. Subtitles are traditionally text-only and are not meant to have effects applied.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------JVK | Editor/Designer/Software Instructor. Pr, Ae, Ch, Ps, Ai, Id
Participant
January 23, 2022

Right but then I will have to manually type out all of my captions. For a 10 minute video, that doesn't work. Is there any way to convert subtitles into an essential graphic layer?

Community Expert
January 26, 2022

A couple of workarounds:

  • If you're on Windows, you can use a tool like SubtitleEdit to import an SRT file of your captions and export them to XML, which will import as Essential Graphics. There may be a MacOS solution as well but I don't know one off-hand. 
  • You can also export your captions and open the SRT in a text editor, then copy+paste the text into Essential Graphics. 

 

I would also make a feature request to allow for doing this within Premiere natively; any others have asked for this too. 

 

JVK

-------------------------------------------------------------------------JVK | Editor/Designer/Software Instructor. Pr, Ae, Ch, Ps, Ai, Id