Exporting Closed Captions for Quicktime

[Jerry Mann]

Hello, I have not found an answer on this forum or with a search of the internet.

I am trying to output a 1080 HD video with closed captions for Quicktime playback on a Mac, using Export in Premier 2022. To be clear, I want to be able to turn the captioning on and off within Quicktime. I read that they need to be formatted in CEA-608 format. However, in the Export tab, down in the Captions dropdown, I only see .SRT as an option. Is that the end of story? Is there something I am missing? Is there a way to do it in Media Encoder (have not tried yet). I see in previous versions there were all sorts of options for doing this. 

I tried to choose a Quicktime preset, thinking that would give me the options I need, but I am not seeing it.

My captions were created within PP using auto-transcribe, and then tweaked. I did not make any settings. I have heard about importing captions and then changing their format before putting in the timeline.

Any direction or workarounds would be appreciated.

Jerry

Editing on a 2019 Macbook Pro, with Ventura OS.

SOURCE FOR QUICKTIME CAPTION REQUIREMENTS:

https://support.apple.com/guide/quicktime-player/show-subtitles-or-captions-qtped9fbc349/10.5/mac/13...

[Jerry Mann]

NOTE: I have seen many answers for earlier versions of PP. I am on PP 2022 and there is nothing explaining this that I can find.

[Stan Jones]

Jerry,

Yes, this should work.

From PR, in the Export mode window, under Format, pick Quicktime. Then look at Captions. Do you see an option for Embed? The option that comes up for me is Quicktime, Prores. That should show embed as an option.

If not, post a screenshot of what you are seeing, the timeline showing the captions header and the export window.

Stan

[Jerry Mann]

Stan, thanks for your reply.

I could not find embed. Please see screenshots. I have looked at each of the Quicktime preset options. Sorry for the brevity, I need to run to work and may not be able to respond until after 5pm EST.

Jerry

[Stan Jones · Accepted solution]

No problem, Jerry. Thanks for responding with the screenshots.

Your caption track is "Subtitle." To be embedded as closed caption, it needs to be 608.

Just right-click the caption track header, pick track settings, and change to 608. Then you should see "embed" as an option in export.

Stan

[Jerry Mann]

Stan, 

This is such great direction. This is exactly the info needed to fix my problem! This has generated closed captions (not subtitles!) that can be turned on and off in Quicktime. Thank you for the concise and clear answer.

It seems that The formatting of my CC's has been corrupted, so I may need to redo the words and get my fonts, shadow etc back. I am guessing that if I had changed the setting to 608 in the beginning this would not be a probelm. But what if we need to export different standards of CC's for different platforms? Would text formatting be something that would change every time that setting was changed?

Again, Thanks so much!

Jerry

[Stan Jones]

Jerry,  unfortunately, that was the easy part!

608 was developed for over the air TV broadcast and with accessibility in mind. Ultimately, the user decides how they will look. When you change the "Subtitle" format to "608" you see fewer styling options in the Essential Graphics Panel.

I don't know; does the Quicktime player also handle using a sidecar file for captions/subtitles? The problem for sidecar usage is that PR exports almost no styling in its SRT export. So my next comments about styles are mostly relevant for burning the style in.

For most of what you are doing, you just create two caption Track Styles. Duplicate your caption track and one will be 608 and the other Subtitle. Note that a track style applies to all the captions/subtitles on the whole track, and includes position. So, for example, let's say you place your captions bottom middle, and then move only 4 of them to the upper right. If you applied the track style before that, no problem. If you apply it after, they will all be moved to the position in the style.

This is also true if you have selected a word here and then and applied italics.

Stan

[Michael Grenadier]

and just to add to your misery, there are a number of different caption formats some of which do support various formatting options...  but although many things are possible, they don't always work depending on the streaming or playback platform you're using...   You might see what works in VLC which will take .srt captions I think...  VLC is the swiss army knife of video playback software, available for mac, windows and smartphones...  and maybe other things...  https://www.videolan.org/vlc/.   I was prepping a feature doc for streaming about a year ago...  Luckily the film festival was very helpful in testing various caption formats...  and I was able to nail varying the vertical position...  And you've got Stan on your case who was extremely helpful to me...  

[Jerry Mann]

Stan, again, thanks for the input and direction. I think I am up for this, except I just cannot figure out why the text is clipping off on the right side of some captions (see screenshot). I thought I might find an option to expand the area for the caption, or increase the number of characters allowed per line, or even decrease the font size. I think I am realizing (as I compose this message!) that there is no control over these things for 608 closed captions, as there are for Subtitles. I think the only solution to getting words to not truncate is to shorten each line and create more lines if necessary (screenshot). Are my thoughts correct?

One more issue is how do I copy settings (such as Appearance) from one caption to the next? I obviously have many captions that I'd like to add the semi-transparent background to. I cannot right click on the caption in the timeline, and I also see no option to copy or create a preset in the Essential Graphics panel.

I thank you, and Michael, for your contributions here and elsewhere in the forums. I am oddly calmed knowing that someone is listening and likely to give me a "custom" answer. It is like stepping inside from the eye of the Google Search Storm. 

Jerry

[Michael Grenadier]

you're welcome.  And although I probably help more often than have been helped, this forum and people like Stan has saved my butt quite a few times.  Can't tell you how valuable it is to just quickly skim thru the posts every few days...  

[Stan Jones]

Jerry,

> It is like stepping inside from the eye of the Google Search Storm. 

OMG, I loved that! I was just searching for how to copy a file from a USB drive to the internal memory of my TV. And I got sucked in to picking the suggested "transferring..." option. All the search results were wrong! (The actual answer was I needed to install a file explorer type app on the TV.)

Yes, 608 is limited to 32 characters. And more lines makes sense.

The "preset" is called a Track Style; it is just above the "Text" section in the EGP. In your subtitle screenshot it shows "None" - correctly since you have not defined a style. To keep your current style (e.g. for the subtitle stream or whatever), do an immediate "Create style" to save that one, before changing to what you want and then creating a style for that.

Stan

[Jerry Mann]

Well, all is good!

I was able to easily adjust the number of lines of text to accomodate my caption length to fit the 32 character limit in 608. While in the player window in PR it may appear that the truncated text is lost, alas it is not. Looking in the Text / Captions tab I found my entire original caption intact, and I only needed to use Return to create additional lines and adjust the text as I wanted it per line.

Another issue that cropped up was an apostrophe came out as a block in my output. It turns out that it was a "smart quote" (I think that is what it is called), where the apostrophe has a curl to it, and not the straight vertical line. I could not edit that in PR, so I opened Text Edit (on my Mac) and typed my apostrophe word, copied and pasted into PR, and that fixed it.

Thanks again for the help!

Jerry

[Stan Jones]

Jerry,

Congrats on your progress!

You can turn off "smart quotes." In the Essential Graphics Panel, in the "hamburger" menu (the 3 lines), there is a check to turn on/off.

It only takes effect on new characters, so your fix was probably just as easy for this project.

Stan

[Motormind_Ali]

I figured out a way to embed captions into a Quicktime file export! Don't ask me why, but when I create TWO seperate caption tracks, one with 608 and one with 708 captions, THEN at export I will see that blessed third option in the captions dialog box to "embed in output file." Not sure why it needs both, but it does.

[Michael Grenadier]

Great discovery and thanks for posting it.   Hopefully I'll never have to embed captions in a quicktime, but if I do....

[Stan Jones]

@Motormind_Ali,

I just tested and you can use only a 608 track and a Quicktime export will give the embed option. If you have a 708 stream only, it does NOT show the embed option, because PR will not embed a 708 stream in Quicktime. If you have both 608 and 708 tracks, embed is an option, but it is only embedding 608.

Stan