Closed Captioning Sidecar Formatting Issues

[Bo AWM]

Hi,

At my organization, we work with caption files for television broadcasting. We're currently experimenting with using Premiere Pro to generate those captions for our workflow, however we've run into some issues with doing so. Whenever we attempt to export a sidecar file with our formatted closed captions, the exported file does not keep the formatting of the captions that we set before exporting, but only the text in the default Premiere format is displayed. Does anyone know why it may be doing that? Is there a workaround or solution to this problem?

[Stan Jones]

@Bo AWM,

The answer to your direct question is that you are probably exporting SRT as the sidecar, and the PR SRT export, even with "styling" selected, carries very little styling. Other sidecar options from PR carry some, but they are designed for closed captioning, and those options are limited, as you would expect.

For Broadcast closed captions, the devil is in the details. Is your ultimate goal to embed captions via PR? Are you delivering a sidecar for the broadcaster? Provide some more info, and I can provide some suggestions.

Stan

[Bo AWM]

@Stan Jones ,

Thanks for responding to my post. 

We typically export the captions as a sidecar file for the broadcaster. Currently we use another third-party app to do so, but we were wanting to see if we could switch over to using Premiere Pro instead, to use one less program. 

The styling is preserved when we burn in the captions with Premiere, but with the sidecar export, it is not. The third-party program exports the styling just fine with the sidecar option, so I'm thinking Adobe could do the same for Premiere, if they wanted to. It should just be a matter of a the functionality into the program's export process. 

I welcome whatever suggestions you may have.

Thanks

[Stan Jones]

The original specifications for srt support surprisingly little styling. If your broadcaster is using srt, you need to understand what their requirements are.

Youtube, for example (not a broadcaster, I realize) takes nothing from srt, and recommends a 608 caption track format and .scc sidecar:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734698?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbasic-file-formats%2Cadvanced-file-...

Stan

[Bo AWM]

Thanks @Stan Jones , this is good information. We typically deliver .scc files to our broadcasters. Maybe Adobe will adopt this or a similar file format in their future iterations of Premiere Pro. I'll continue to experiment with things on my end to see if I make any progress in this regard. I appreciate your helpfulness.  

[Stan Jones]

PR will export .scc in the Export -> Media options for sidecar export.

Stan

[Bo AWM]

Ok. Is there a tutorial you can point me to that shows how to do that? I don't seem to be able to find the option for .scc on my end.

[Stan Jones]

The Caption Track type must be 608.

File -> Export -> Media (shortcut Ctrl+M).

Under Captions, select sidecar, then look for SCC.

Does that work?

Stan

[Bo AWM]

Stan, I want to express my sincere thanks for your help with this issue. Following your instructions,  I was able to export a .scc sidecar file that kept its preset properties, and is also able to be toggled on and off. I very much appreciate your responses.

I do have one more issue that I haven't been able to resolve yet. It has to do with the caption font case. Do you know if there is a way to set the captions to be all uppercase, instead of using sentence case?

Bo

[Stan Jones]

See my post here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/premiere-captions-lower-case-to-upper-case-a...

So I think the answer is no. And what you need is not applying a faux style, but actually converting to all caps. With an srt file, you could bring it into a text editor (I like Notepad++ on windows), select all, and Edit->Convert Case to->Uppercase. But you can't do that with a .scc file.

So the long workaround would be to export srt, convert case to uppercase, import captions from file (as 608), and then style and export .scc.

Stan

[Bo AWM]

Ok. Thanks for all your helpfulness Stan. 

[Stan Jones]

Let us know how this works out.

The other issue at times is whether the file works for a broadcaster.

Stan