I've recently tried to use Premiere to burn in captions for Social Media versions of some videos. Normally I use the much better, free, and open source software ffmpeg, but a couple of reasons meant that I thought it was going to be faster in PP. Mistake #1.
- First off: when I import an SRT file that I get from my captioning service, by default it is interpreted as NTSC DV, non-square pixels at 1000fps. That is just insane. Why can't it default to my project settings. It means each time I re-import the captions (which is far more often than it should be—see below) I have to do the modify>interpret footage>captions dance.
- For whatever reason, my captioning service often sends me srt files with blank captions. So the srt will look like
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00:01:28,460 --> 00:01:31,100
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00:01:31,100 --> 00:01:35,810
Then after that, they pretty much
ffmpeg (the aforementioned free, open source video tool) doesn't have a problem with this, neither does VLC, MPV, MPC-HC and MPC-BE. You wanna guess whether Premiere can handle it properly? Hint: of course not, it mangles all the following captions, putting bits of timecode in the text, wrecking the timing and generally turning the whole thing to custard. So I have to do a regex search to delete all empty captions, and re-import (see below) - If I edit the captions file externally it doesn't update in the project. Say if someone spots a name that's spelled wrong I can't just do a find-and-replace using a text editor, I have to use the ditzy premiere pro subtitle editor and hand replace every. Single. F☠☢↯ing. One. Meaning more likelyhood of missing one and having to do it all again. Even if I close the project, edit the srt and re-open. Even if I try Replace Footage on the subtitles file. The only way I can update it is to totally delete it and import it again. See step 1
- If I change the font or text settings in the subtitle editor and then switch to a timeline with different captions, the changes that I make in the first timeline are applied to the second, or sometimes the default subtitle style (which is useless, BTW) is applied, and no further editing of the text style has any effect. To get it to update I have to quit PP and restart.
- If I send the sequence to Media Encoder mostly it just ignores the captions track entirely. I have to stop editing and encode the sequence with Premiere if I want to actually see burnt-in subtitles.
So if I'm doing a whole bunch of clips I have to edit one, quit Premiere, import the next, change the interpretation settings, change the font and character settings, encode the clip from Premier, quit Premier and repeat. So what is literally a two minute job with powershell and ffmpeg (I actually have a burn-subtitles.ps1 script that I wrote that does the entire thing for me with one command) turns into an all afternoon and then late-home-from-work-again nightmare. Please Adobe, can you fix this, because the workflow is terrible.
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I really forgot how that software was named, but if i find out i'll replay for sure. It was amazing tho
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