SCC captions appearing early in Premiere Pro playback
- June 5, 2022
- 1 reply
- 2256 views
I have created scc files for three decades for my clients using Swift Create. Recently, I thought I would try playing back my captions in Premiere Pro. I loaded one of my SCC caption files in Premiere Pro and found that all the captions appeared early on playback (a minimum of a half-second early, sometimes earlier).
After investigating, I discovered the reason for this:
Premiere Pro was using the SCC times as APPEAR times. However, scc times are not appear times, they are the times when the viewer's encoder needs to start generating the caption. For instance, my file has a musical note that is timed to appear at the 11th frame of the film. But Premiere Pro displays it at the SCC file's 00:00 mark, which is actually the time when the encoder on the viewer's end should start GENERATING the caption with the musical note, NOT the time when the caption with the musical note should appear on the screen.
I'm sure there must be a way to get Premiere Pro to emulate an encoder for broadcast captions so that scc files play in sync with the audio..
I tried discussing this with a customer rep, but he kept telling me that Adobe couldn't help me with my captioning software. I told him, with respect, that my software has nothing to do with it. I know my scc files are correct -- if they weren't, I would have been out of business years ago, especially since the timing of cap files has to be frame-perfect in places (for instance, at certain shot changes).
The real issue seems to be that there's something that I don't understand about how Premiere Pro works when it comes to displaying scc broadcast captions.
A second (but surely less likely) possibility is that Premiere Pro is not designed to display broadcast captions correctly (i.e. with the necessary build-up time) unless the captions were created inside Premiere Pro itself.
Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated!
Brian
PS The customer rep's last suggestion was for me to try loading last year's Premiere Pro. It was then that I realized I wasn't getting through to him. That's when I thought I'd try my luck by posting the question here, in the hopes of finding someone who knows a little more about closed captions and Premiere Pro.
