SRT captions not filling timeline track

[lorenm84878416]

Premiere Pro V 23.4.0

Mac Studio M1 Ultra 64GB

Mac OS 13.2.1 Ventura

Project- 10-minute Proof of Concept piece, 4K ProRes 422 (HQ)

The steps taken:

- Import standard SRT captions sidecar file into Project panel, generated by pro agency (ViCaps)

- Drag program to generate timeline from movie export file named identically to SRT file, from same folder which also contains project file.

- Drag SRT file containing full list of subtitles

Expected result: full caption track appearing above video track.

Actual Result: only the first two SRT files show up and the rest do not appear, nor do they show up in the Text panel.

Research:

I examined the SRT file-- it is complete. Timecode ends in Audio Units, not Frames, so for one experiment changed timecode to Audio Units (100ths of a second). Otherwise, frame rate is 23.976.

I note SRT files import at 30 FPS and I've been told this is normal and should not affect display of captions. Indeed the company provided an ad hoc video of the process using V 15 of Premiere, which I followed.

I've done everyhting I can, with the same stubborn result. I suspect an expert eye on the SRT file would detect anything I can't. They can't see anything wrong.

(BTW I don't see a topic item for Captions- Subtitles! This is a crucial post area.)

Cannot attach the SRT file for the following reason- 

"Correct the highlighted errors and try again.

• The attachment's poc_fine cut 01 with stereo mix- french.srt content type (application/octet-stream) does not match its file extension and has been removed."

I will report this to the captions company as well. But am I doing anything wrong I need to correct?

Best as always,
Loren

[Stan Jones]

loren,

Yes, this is almost always some issue with the srt file. For example, if there is an extra line in a caption, PR may interpret it as the end of the file.

If it imports, but only shows captions 1 and 2, then it is probably something about caption 2 or caption 3. You might open it in a text editor, and copy/paste the beginning of the file through caption 3. We might see the problem from that.

Stan

[Stan Jones]

I have not seen this before. When a caption ends with a number (e.g. 304) on its own line (e.g. captions 2, 16, and 71), PR does not like it, and stops importing at the end of the previous line.

Subtitle Edit, using the "fix common errors" tool, proposed making it part of the previous line, and adding a period. So I guessed at adding a period at the end of the number (and leaving it on its own line). This worked, and imports all 115 captions.

I do not know why that should create an error.

Stan

[lorenm84878416]

Stan-

Wow. Gottaa try this! Thank you for your insight. Subtitle Edit is a free app, I guess? 

Going to be funny reporting this to ViCaps, if it works, They're very snobby about the corrcetness of their files.

Not like I'm going to needle them about it, but if it works, they will surely hear, and so will you.

You sound like SRT files are pretty common for you. Can you give me an idea of what you do?

I've been a film editor for about 50 years, and there is no finish line to learning.

Best as always,
Loren

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Loren,

Great to hear from you, my friend. @Stan Jones is an Adobe Expert, quite adept at troubleshooting captions, speech to text, and text-based editing issues. Yes, he is an experienced pro editor and well-respected. We appreciate him so much!

Stan, I've known Loren for a long time from our time as fellow Final Cut Pro User Group community folks; probably over 20 years now! 🙂

Thanks,
Kevin

[lorenm84878416]

I happily confirm Stan's solution and this appears to be a bonafide and hopefully temporary SRT imprt bug.

For version 23.4.0 (Build 56) at least, here's the workaround:

1- Open the SRT file in Apple's TextEdit or Windows equivalent.

2- In the list, find all subs ending with a number (such as a year, or a room number sub)

3- Add a period after the number(s).

5- Re-save the file as itself.

6- Import into Premiere, and confirm the adjustments came through and allowed all subs to import.

7- In those cases where you don't want a period showing after the number, edit it out in Premiere's Text panel.

Voila.

Stan, great thanks for reducing my headache (and others I'm sure) and making such a clear observation.

I've sent this wisdom to the captioning company, treating it as a temporary bug preculiar to this release of PPro.

Now, I haven't exported the program with edited titles just yet, so if there's any further glitch, I will append.

Best as always,
Loren

[lorenm84878416]

Hi, Kevin-

Yeah, time to give Stan a raise!

Best as always,
Loren

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hey Loren,

Stan is a volunteer, but you're right, he deserves serious compensation for all he does here! Thanks, Stan! Have a great weekend, Loren!

Cheers,
Kevin

[Stan Jones]

Yes, I'd happily accept twice my salary! lol.

I also filed this as a bug in the Beta forum:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-beta-discussions/srt-with-number-on-a-second-line-import...

This has been present since at least PR 2022, and is in the current Beta (23.6.0.18). It was not in PR 2020 (the version before the new caption workflow). I did not test PR 2021.

Stan

[joa38083608]

It's interesting to hear others are also having issues with SRT files in V23 (currently using 23.4.0 (Build 56)). Our issues seem unrelated to subs ending with a number, though, so I'm not sure this fix applies. Today we had a file from a translator that displayed all the subtitles when imported into V2021 but in V2023 they cut off at a certain point. From scrutinising the SRT file, I eventually realised that the translator has used ’ as an apostrophe, but when typed on my keyboard apostrophes look like this: '. Replacing all of them worked, but I also had to replace '€' with 'EUR' in a few places to get all the captions to appear. Prior to this we'd resorted to importing SRTs into an earlier version of Premiere and laying the captions over an export of the edit. But this issue with the apostrophe and Euro symbo makes it seem like V2023 has a problem recognising certain characters. It would be great if Adobe could look into this. Thanks.

[IanB_360]

updating status. Fixed version 25