DISCUSS: New Captions Workflow in Premiere Pro

[Francis-Crossman]

UPDATE: January 29, 2021

Since the innitial post back in October of last year we have made a ton of progress and some of the details originally posted here are no longer acurate.  I have updated the post to be more accurate to the state of things today.  

Here are some important changes to be aware of

• The Premiere Pro beta is now version 15 (starting January 26, 2021)
• The captions workflow in on by default - no need to enable it
• The beta menu has been removed (because you don't need it anymore - the advanced beta features are always on)
• Applications for speech to text early access has closed and those who have been accepted should have recieved an email.  The email you used to apply needs to match the email (Adobe ID) you use to log into creative cloud. If you did not recieve an email stating that you have been accepted, or if you are logged into creative cloud using a different email you will contininue to see the message stating that speech to text is coming soon.
• Broadcast closed captions are now supported CEA 608/708, OP47, Teletext, EBU Subtitles.
• Exporting is working (burned-in, sidecar, embedded) and queue to Media Encoder is working too now.

Thanks to everyone for testing and for all your awesome feedback! - Francis

The captioning workflow in Premiere Pro is getting a complete makeover and you can be the first to try it out!  We have a new text panel for editing and viewing your captions as text.  Captions now have their own track on the timeline so they can be edited just like video.  Styling uses the power of the Essential Graphics panel so you can make fantastic looking captions. 

Best of all – we will be adding speech to text and auto captions powered by Adobe Sensei – coming later.

 

Some important things to know before you start testing this feature

1. Just like any beta software, we do not recommend using this for mission critical projects since features are likely to change over time. 
2.  The Premiere Pro beta has been updated to the next major version – 15.  This means your projects will NOT be backwards compatible with the current shipping version of Premiere Pro – 14.x.  All projects created in Premiere Pro Beta, even if you don’t use captions, will be saved as version 15. 
3. Opening existing projects in Premiere Pro Beta will ask you to save a copy of your project in the new project version. Take extra care with Team Projects since you do not get a version update warning and you can mess up the project for your entire team!
4. If you have existing captions in a project that gets upgraded, we will convert from the old style captions to the new style.  We will do our best to match the styling, but do not guarantee a pixel-perfect transition. 

So, if you’re good with all that, read on . . .

Enabling the Feature:

1. Update to the latest Beta version - you're done.  It's on by default now

Quickstart Guide: 

Download this sample project to follow along PR New Captions Workflow quickstart.zip

1. Open the sequence The climber - start here and familiarize yourself with the spoken dialog.
2. Open the Text panel from the window menu and make sure it’s showing the Captions tab.
3. Locate the SRT file in the project panel The Climber - subtitles.srt
4. Drag the SRT file into the sequence and drop it anywhere. 
5. A new caption track is created, and all the caption items are placed at the correct time.
6. Place the playhead over one of the caption items to select it.  This should activate the Essential Graphics panel into editing mode.
7. Change the Style in the Essential Graphics panel by choosing a different preset from the Style dropdown.
8. Notice the font, size, color, and background have been updated.
9. Play the sequence and watch the captions follow along in the Text panel.

Play around with visual styles in the Essential Graphics panel and try editing the text in the Text panel.  Read on for more detailed info on the various pieces of the workflow.

The Text Panel
Open the Text panel from the Window menu.  This is where you interact with text and it has two tabs – Transcript and Captions

 

1. Text panel – open from the Window Menu
2. Transcript tab – This is where you can create automatic speech to text transcriptions, navigate the transcript, and create automatic captions.  This is only available to those who been accepted into the eary access program for speech to text.  All others will continue to see the "coming soon" graphics.
   
3. Captions tab – Navigate and edit caption text.
4. Search – find characters, words and phrases in your captions.
5. Next / Previous search result – use to navigate search results.
6. Replace / Replace All – used to replace search results with new text.
   
7. Add Caption – this will place a blank caption at the playhead in the current sequence
8. Caption number – a sequence number to count your captions
9. Timecode – TC start and stop of the current caption item.  This is not editable.  To change the timing of the caption, edit it in the sequence.
10. Caption text – the text of the caption itself.  Double click to edit.

The Caption track - working with captions in the Sequence

We have completely reimagined the way captions work in Premiere Pro. If you have used captions previously in Premiere Pro, this is totally different – much better we think. Please tell us what YOU think by leaving a public comment below.

 

Create and delete caption tracks

There are a few ways to create a new caption track.  You can drag an SRT file onto the Sequence or use the “Create new captions track” button in the Captions tab of the Text panel. To delete a caption track, right-click on the caption track header and choose “delete track”

Drag an SRT file on the sequence

Dragging an SRT caption file onto the Sequence will automatically create a new caption track at the top of the Timeline.

Keyboard Shortcuts

To see all the keyboard shortcuts available for captions, open the keyboard shortcuts menu from the Premiere Pro menu and search for "caption".  Here are some notable ones.  There are many other which do not have default assignments.

1. Add a captions track - option/alt + command/ctrl + A
2. Add a new caption segment at the playhead- option/alt + command/ctrl + C
3. Go to next caption segment in the timeline - option/alt + command/ctrl + UP
4. Go to next caption segment in the timeline - option/alt + command/ctrl + down

Captions tracks

 

1. Caption track setting – the CC button

This can hide the caption track area or solo just the active caption track if you have more than one.  It is useful if you want to declutter your timeline. It does not turn off the active caption track from rendering in the program monitor, however. 

• Hide all caption tracks
• Show all caption tracks
• Show active caption track only 

2. Active Track/Visibility – the eyeball icon

This will enable/disable Program Monitor viewing of the Caption track selected. Only one Caption track can be active at a time, so when you make one track active, the other tracks will automatically be disabled. You can also choose to disable all Caption tracks. Inactive Caption tracks will dim making it easier to note your active Caption track. 

3. Label

By default, this will show the caption track format (eg Subtitles, CEA-708, CEA-608, etc.) You can right-click the Caption track header and choose Rename to choose a custom name (same functionality as A/V tracks)

4. Right-click the caption track header

Additional caption tracks can be added by right-clicking in the caption track header – choose “Add Track”. You can also delete or rename a caption track in the same way.

5. Caption tracks area

Caption tracks will always be at the top of the sequence. Additional caption tracks are added on top. This will continue until you have reached 25% of the Timeline vertical space, then the tracks will stop “growing” and scroll bars will appear to the right. Caption tracks will never take up more than 25% of the upper space of the Timeline. This is dynamic, so if you increase or decrease the Timeline panel height, the 25% will adjust accordingly.

6. Track Lock

Lock the track to prevent editing.  This functions the same as A/V tracks.

7. Track Targeting

The Caption track header has a ‘Toggle the track targeting for this track’ button with same functionality as A/V tracks.

8. Sync Lock

The Caption track header has a ‘Toggle Sync Lock’ button with same functionality as A/V tracks.

Editing timing of caption items on the track

You can use all the familiar editing tools that you are used just like editing video and audio.

 

• Select (one or many) You can select multiple Caption track items by Shift-selecting each item or marquee/lasso select items or use Select All (which will also include other items in tracks like video, audio, etc.)
• Trim
• Ripple Trim
• Razor/Add Edit: You can add an edit/razor a Caption item as you would with any Timeline item and Track Targeting is supported. The difference is that when you razor a Caption item, both items will have the same text which you can then modify in the Text panel
• Copy/Paste: paste of Caption item(s) follows Track targeting which allows you to copy and paste captions items between tracks.

Styling with the Essential Graphics panel

Open the Essential Graphics panel from the Window menu.  This is where you choose things like font, size, color and position. Make sure you have at least one caption selected. This will activate the Edit tab of the Essential Graphics panel. If you have created and stylized text in Premiere Pro before, the following should be very familiar to you. However, for captions we are adding small enhancements such as zones, and vertical text alignment.

Styles

• Create Master Text Styles for consistent styling across the entire captions track. A style saves all the settings made in the Essential Graphics panels, including font, alignment, color and more. Setting a Master Text Style to one caption applies it to all captions on the track. You can have different styles for different tracks.
• Sync from Master Style and Push to Master Style: When changing the look of a caption you may want to push this change to the entire track for consistency, that’s were Push to Master Style comes into play. Or you might want to revert an edit to a caption back to the Master Style. Then use Sync from Master Style.
•  

Text

• Font: Set font, font style and font size.
• Paragraph Alignment: For horizontal alignment use Left align text, Center align text, Right align text and Justify. We have now also added Vertical alignment with Top align text, Center text vertically and Bottom align text. This defines how a caption grows when adding additional lines. As an example, there is a good chance you will want a caption to be bottom aligned, this way a single line caption and the second line of a two-line caption will always be in the same vertical position.
• Tracking: Loose or tighten the space between characters.
• Leading: Loose or tighten the vertical space between lines.
• Faux Styles: Bold, Italic, All Caps, Small Caps, Superscript, Subscript, Underline.

Align and Transform

• Position captions with zones: You can choose from different zones to position your caption in different areas on screen, e.g. bottom center.
• Fine tune position: Through Set Horizontal and Set Vertical Position you can add an offset to your zone setting.
• Change the text box size: If you want to shrink or expand the text box size you can do this through Set Horizontal Scale and Set Vertical Scale. This will affect text wrapping and paragraph align settings.

Appearance

• Fill: Change the color of your captions.
• Stroke: Add single or multiple strokes. The Graphics Properties menu under the wrench menu gives you more control over stroke styling.
• Background: Add a background box. You can choose the color, add additional padding and change the opacity.
• Shadow: You can add a shadow and fine tune with controls such as opacity, angle, distance and more.

Transcribing the dialog into captions

You have three options for transcribing your audio and creating captions: speech to text, use a third-party service, or do it by hand.

Speech to text

• Text Panel > Transcript tab
• Only available for those who have applied and been accepted to the speech to text early access program.  Other will not have access to this feature.

Use a third-party service

If you already have a workflow that uses a third party transcription service, you can bring in that file.  SRT is the best option.

1. Import the SRT file into your Premiere Pro project just like any piece of media
2. Drag the SRT from the project panel into your sequence and let go anywhere
3. A new caption track is automatically created, and the captions are placed on the track

Do it by hand

For short sequences, doing it by hand may not too much trouble.

1. Open Text panel from the Window menu
2. Go to the Captions tab of the Text Panel
3. Press the “Add Captions Track” button – a new captions track is added to your current sequence
4. Place the playhead at the beginning of your first piece of dialog (hint – use the waveforms in the audio to help align)
5. Press the “+” button near the top of the Captions tab of the Text Panel to add a blank caption
6. Double click on <Type your caption here> to go into edit mode
7. Type out the caption text
8. Trim the end of the caption in the timeline to align with the end of the spoken dialog
9. Repeat for each caption you wish to add
10. See the other sections on Working with captions in the Sequence and Styling with the Essential Graphics panel for more details on editing and styling.

Exporting your sequence with captions

There are three options for exporting captions: burned in, sidecar file, or embedded into the video file.  

1. Make sure the caption track you want exported is visible by toggling the eyeball on (Toggle Active Captions Track).
2. Choose File > Export
3. Open the Captions tab in the export settings and choose burn in, sidecar or embedded
4. Burned in and sidecar are supported with any encoding preset
5. Embedded is limited to pro codecs like MXF OP1a, DNX, and Prores and requires that the caption track format be set to one of the broadcast standards like CEA-608
6. Click Export
7. Sidecar files will be saved next to the video file with the same name
8. Queueing to Media encoder is supported too

Happy captioning!  Once again, we welcome your feedback.  Please leave comments below.

[Zbyszko Rylec]

In the latest release of beta, italic captions imports correctly, there is also ability to change font without losing "mixed" type of text 🙂 There is a bit of confusion with text panel that doesn't shows basic formatting such as: italic, bold, underlying, number of lines etc. The panel should definatelly reproduce such things as it does in legacy caption panel. Another thing is scrolling response of text panel. While scrubbing in timeline, text panel stays a lote behind time bar.

[Wholeo]

I used and liked the previous CC use in Premiere 2020 and have now started a new track in the Premiere Beta. I didn't import the sample or its SRT but used my own movie. All was easy to follow until I came to this issue I saw addressed below (quoting): "When clicking on the '+' button to add a new caption, text entry should automatically be entered by default." In other words I stared at <Type your caption here> , clicked to paste in the text, and nothing happened. That followed with almost an hour of reviewing my path to this point, clicking, learning, trying, fooling around, etc. until I read in that comment quoted above, "double-clicking". I had not thought of that. Quickly tried and it worked. 

If you need a double-click, you could change the suggestion to

<Double-click and Enter your caption here>

Many of us will be pasting, not typing, especially until transcribing is available.

[Francis-Crossman]

This is really good feedback.  Thank you.  Others have also commented that hitting the + button should automaticaly place you into text entry mode which I think makes a lot of sense.    

[Kuprikki]

Hi,
is the "press spacebar or enter to add a caption segment" a feature or a bug? OSX Mojave, Captions panel active: press either one and you have a new segment. First you have to add one with the plus button, after that enter: add a segment, spacebar: stop and add, or play and add a new segment.

[Pierre Louis B.]

v14.7 Observations (after 5 minutes of testing):

1. Poor Icons: The icons for 'Split Transcript' and 'Merge Transcript' are poorly thought out.  Text in most languages goes left to right or vice versa, not up/down.  Timeline clips always go left/right.  So why do these icons represent a cut or merge between up/down?  I suggest rotating these icons 90 degrees to better represent what they do text-wise and Timeline-wise rather than just Text panel-wise.
2. Bug: Clicking on the 'Add new captions segment' creates a new caption in the Timeline but it doesn't show the new caption in the Text panel until the user selects any caption in the Timeline.
3. Awful Interface Names: The names given to the new buttons in the Text panel is a mess. 
   

   Original Name	Suggested Name	Notes
   Add new captions segment	New Caption	Original name unnecessarily verbose
   Split Transcript	Split Caption	‘Transcript’ not consistent with calling captions what they are: ‘captions’!
   Merge Transcript	Merge Captions	‘Merge Transcript’ is inconsistent and confusing.

   For the sake of brevity and preserving my own sanity, I shall hereforth refer to the 'Add new captions segment' button as simply the 'New Caption' button when referencing it in future observations.  I will also refer to the other buttons as Split Caption and Merge Captions.

4. New Caption = Overwrite?: If clicking on the ‘New Caption’ button while the playhead is on the first frame of an existing caption, the playhead should automatically jump to the end of the existing caption and add a new caption there rather than overwriting the current caption!  No one in their right mind would ever want it to work the way it does now.  Please design new tools to be as logical and helpful as possible, rather than unexpected and frustrating.

5. Shift-Select flaw: It’s nice to see Ctrl and Shift-Selecting added to the Text panel, but even while apparently trying to respect global selection conventions, a convention was broken in the process: why does a user first have to Ctrl-select a caption before being able to Shift-select a range of captions?  This is awful design.  Simply selecting a caption by clicking on it (which highlights its text blue) should suffice!  Please fix this and then fix the rest of Pr’s selection inconsistencies so that selecting in any Pr window/panel works the way it does in Pr’s own Project window (and in every other piece of convention/user respecting software in the world).

6. <Type your caption here> text remains?: The <Type your caption here> text should automatically disappear when clicking a new caption to edit it. Period. The way it is now, if a user clicks on or next to this text, it becomes unselected and therefore remains as text in the caption.  No one will ever want this behavior, ever.
7. Split Caption shortcut: The Split Caption function should have a simple shortcut: Ctrl+Enter.

   Enter =	Start new line when typing caption text
   Ctrl+Enter =	Split caption at cursor location

   Simple, intuitive and logical!
8. Can't Delete Selected Captions: Why can't captions selected in the Text Panel be deleted?
9. 'Split Caption' Duplicates rather that Split: Already pointed this out, but the Split Caption button duplicates a caption rather than split it.  Hopefully this is fixed before official release.

That's it for now.  Looking forward to seeing these and other bugs/issues fixed in upcoming builds. 

[fionnm61793799]

Hi

First up, well done, great to see this feature being developed.

Just a couple of small things that are bugging me with it, using imported SRT files:

1) If I double click in a block of double line text in the text tool I immediately get a tiny '?' or an 'x' appearing in a small box at the start of the second line. This appears in the program monitor but not the text tool. I can delete it, but it changes the subtitle to a single line, which I can't seem to then undo. 

Which brings me to:

2) I would expect to be able to place the cursor anywhere on a single line of text, hit Return, and have that split into a double line subtitle (as would happen working in the graphics tool.) This doesn't seem to work. 

I can't see anybody else having raised these issues already though, so perhaps it's just me! 

Anyway, keep up the great work. Loving the Scene Edit Detection as well! 

F

[Pierre Louis B.]

I can't see anybody else having raised these issues already though, so perhaps it's just me!

It's definitely not just you fionn!  The inability to split a line of text into two by pressing Enter/Return is an issue I imagine most beta tester encounter soon enough.  It's just that most people don't care to report some/most of the issues they encounter.

[Pierre Louis B.]

Greetings!  A couple more things I just noticed:

1. Selecting Text in Text Panel: Individual words in a caption can't be selected in the Text Panel.  This is counter intuitive/productive.  Adding this would be beneficial since it would make it easier to delete text or replace it by selecting and typing new text over the selection.  The text input window for captions should work as users expect: the way even the most basic of word processors/text entry fields do.
2. Formating Shortcuts: When selecting individual caption words in the Program Monitor (or Text Panel, once this extremely basic functionality is added), universal formating shortcuts should apply: Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italics, Ctrl+U for underline.  Hopefully these are features that are in the pipeline and just haven't been added yet.  If not, what's the reason for omitting such basic features?  Even Windows Wordpad has this! 😉  I know formating can be achieved through buttons in the EGP, but new workflows should be about achieving maximum efficiency, not relagating basic functions to mousing/clicking which is always much slower than using a keyboard shortcut.

That's it for now.  As always, thanks for listening!

[hellopaul4]

I'd love to use the new captioning workflow (because the old one is appalling - tha alignment of the background box bears little relation to the right margin of the text), but the new captioning workflow doesn't currently work on my system (Windows 10) - at all. I can add a caption, and while the video is playing in PPro, it displays correctly. But as soon as I stop playback, it vanishes. And when I export video, it vanishes too. (And I'm using open captions). I'll just have to manually add them tediously in After Effects!

[Trent Happel]

Sorry, we currently have an open issue (starting in 14.7 Beta 017) with GPU on Windows that results in no display in the Program Monitor on pause/stop and with High Quality Playback. We are working on it and hope to have a fix ASAP.

A possible workaround until then is to change Project Settinsg > General > Video Rendering and Playback to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only.

[hellopaul4]

I've updated top the latest Beta release (14.8.0 Build 5(R)) and it all works beautifully with GPU acceleration now. Thanks for the fix!

[EverydayFilms]

Hey Adobe folks!  Thank you for tackling this process; it's an ever-increasing need.  The current available workflows all include exporting and then re-importing back into Adobe.  I'm glad to read that .srt files are coming in later builds. But even still, those are just caption files; what would really help make this more usable is data-rich exports like JSON files.  It's like the difference between a jpeg and a raw.  Can we please have JSON import/export?  Thinking ahead, when you do speech-to-text, won't that export a JSON file?  Why not allow import of that, or is that coming as well?

[GoalcastDan]

I would love the ability to make captions only a single line. I use REV to create SRT's at the moment, and they for some reason dont have that capability, so I'll have to go in and make sure they're one line each, which means adding new captions, copying and pasting/adjusting. The new caption workflow seems to make it easier, but if there's anyway to streamline the "single line" caption apporach it'd be appreciated! 

[zdrescher]

We do two lines of captions in a frame of video, and my client often has opinions about where the line breaks should go. For example, we like to have a line break after a comma, or to even out the length of the top and bottom lines. In the new Text window in Premiere Beta, the Captions editor does not allow you to make a line break at all - it's dependent on the size of the text. It would be great to be able to make a line break (preferably by simply hitting the 'return' key) when creating captions from scratch.

I also tried importing an SRT which I had made previously. It read the line breaks in the SRT file, but if I went to edit the line breaks that were there, I was able to delete them, but not add them. Hopefully you can add both functionalities at once!

[Neckebba]

Hello All,

Some points are already stated, but wanted to repeat so Adobe knows there more people on those points who like some improvement .

1/ Can we have in the subtitel track more "edit" features , like Extend to out point/inpoint ? Or if we are working in timeline and put an IN and OUT point we can have somethink like "add titel between In and Out" ? 

2/ Why isnt it possible to acivate two or More lines? whats the philosophy behind this? Will be able to export more then one line as a sidecar file? 

3/ Been able to do a hard break (ENTER) on the point in the subtitel we want would be very nice.

4/ Can we mix open and closed captions?  

5/ Import and export STL would be nice (and correct way of doing, because on the old captions, the interpretation of the .STL was not always correct).

6/ When is it the idea to go "live" on the new captions?  (planning wise in big company not so easy)

[jstrawn]

3/ Been able to do a hard break (ENTER) on the point in the subtitel we want would be very nice.

Good news... This is already possible in the Text panel / Captions tab or by using the Type tool on Caption text inthe Program Monitor. If you're not seeing it, you may need a newer Beta build. (I am on Pr14.8.0xBeta028)

[johankokken]

doing a hard break adds a strange character in my current version. (Pr14.8.0B31)

Tried other fonts, kind of simular result:

[Nate McFadden]

Hello All!

I wanted to give a quick update on some new features that have been added to our beta build! There are a number of features turned on, the most noticeable are: 

• SRT and STL export is now turned on
• Embedded Closed Captions are now turned on (Import and Editing only so far)
• Scrolling in the Text Panel has been optimized
• Native Export in AME

Questions and feedback are most welcome!

[ikaika60]

I GET NONE OF THIS STUFF.   I had uploaded this beta a previous time, only to have the caption  workflow setting not work nor how to get to it.  So I uninstalled it.  Then on my FB feed, you guys blare that you can try out the captioning workflow AGAIN in beta, snd like an idiot I uploaded it AGAIN...and AGAIN I take time out of my workday to do the upload - which took 90 minutes, AGAIN there is nothing to go to the capitoning workflow so it closes the program.  AGAIN I open it to try the caption workflow only it's NOT THERE. And AGAIN, I have to uninstall this because the function I need to move my projects into the future aren't there...AGAIN!  This has become so frustrating that I've given up on trying to caption my projects.

[Nate McFadden]

Hello,

Sorry to hear you are running into trouble. It sounds very frustrating. 

To clarify, there is no need to uninstall Beta builds, they can coexist on a system with a release build. 

Which beta build number were you using?  What sort of captions workflow are you attempting?

Best Regards,

Nate McFadden

Senior Quality Engineer

[Stan Jones]

ikai,

I wonder if you have not "enabled" the new captions workflow? See the top of the very first post in this thread, "Enabling the Feature."

Also note the cautions, particularly #2:

Enabling the new captions workflow will require the project to be updated to the next major version of Premiere Pro (version 15).  This means your projects will NOT be backwards compatible with the current shipping version of Premiere Pro.  All projects created in Premiere Pro Beta with this feature turned on, even if you don’t use captions, will be saved as version 15. 

Stan

[johankokken]

STL export as a sidecar works, but the captions are still burned in.

[Nate McFadden]

Thanks @johankokken - there is no way to turn off one or the other currently (still under construction), but this will be addressed.

[Huckstero]

Maybe add something like this to speed up the captioning? Just enter one text after another - and adjust the timing.

[johankokken]

and with a shortcut, please.