Grouping Captions

Report · Aug 10, 2022

I'm making the switch from V14 to V15 and Premiere has changed how it imports SCC and SRT files.

In the old version the SCC came in as one video "unit" which could be cut and moved around easily. In the new version each caption is its own "unit", generating hundreds of individual items on my timeline in the caption track.

When I add in a break, I used to be able to make a cut and just drag the full caption segment around with one click.

Now, it is a huge pain to be selecting all, or locking other tracks and using track forward select, or zooming out and highlighting everything and then zooming in to shift everything down 10 frames. Really slows down the workflow.

Is there a way to "group" or "link" captions like you can with other timeline elements? There seem to be no right click options on the captions at all.

Or is this issue resolved in V22 and I should upgrade to that version?

Please help! Thank you!

Report · Aug 10, 2022

There is no change in PR Version 22.x regarding this.

Yes, the change from "captions as a video clip" to captions as their own entity, and individual segments rather than a "track as a whole" - resulted in a number of problems for old workflows. But then splitting that old "caption clip" created its own problems - for which you had some kind of workaround.

I think that your best workaround now is what you describe - copy or cut/paste the items you want to move.

Note that the new captions will move with the sequence changes, meaning that if you insert something to the whole sequence, the captions should move to stay in sync with the sequence. This includes a caption splitting if you are in the middle of a caption segment where you insert.

If you are only burning in, you can nest the original captions (disable everything other than the caption track in that sequence to be nested), but they will no longer be editable captions, except in the original sequence.

You can copy/paste captions from one sequence to another.

Other options and gotchas; feel free to ask further.

They are actively working on the caption workflow and on caption/graphics text export, import, and conversion. Exciting changes and yes some growing pains.

Stan

Report · Aug 10, 2022

Thank you for your reply, Stan. I was driving myself crazy looking for a functionality that doesn't exist. I noticed that insert will still ripple edit the captions, thank goodness, but even with that, to do what we need is still is several more clicks and a slower workflow than the original cut-and-drag-over method from V14. Another stuation where having one solid caption file is handy is when the full video needs to be slipped a few frames and then the captions can be slipped or nudged with an easy click just like the video. Now more complicated workarounds, like using in/out/lift or the highlighting/track select/zooming out workflow I mentioned earlier, are required to make the same tweak--and it is much easier to accidentally destroy a caption element (by not selecting it and dragging over clips, for example, or knocking the elements out of sync) and not notice right away.

Your advice about nesting is good to know! Unfortunately it's not applicable here, as I do need to sidecar these captions as metadata.

I hope Adobe figures out a way to allow users to "group" captions like any other timeline clips soon, or tie/link it to picture. The new layout allows for a lot of cool new functionality for creators, but makes pairing video and premade SCC files for traditional broadcast--or video files of 40min or more with hundreds if not thousands of unique caption elements--much more inconvenient.

Again, I appreciate your response! Hopefully it is an area Adobe will improve in this growing pain period.