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sBirch
Known Participant
November 10, 2016
Question

How does a GOOD Open Captions workflow look like in Premiere Pro?

  • November 10, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 1423 views

IT must certainly involve something that isn't Premiere Pro. I have struggled with this feature since I found it first time back in CC 2015.3.

I have a video, and need to subtitle it for other languages. The video is transcribed and the text sent to a translator. We get it back in a SRT format, which YouTube supports. SRT is just text. Text and time codes. It is the simplest product you could imagine.

So, when importing a SRT file to your Premiere Pro project, what do you get?

A 720x480p file. You cannot change the resolution. So your 1080p video cannot use 1080p subtitles. They are rendered as 480p - and if you scale them you get all the glorious pixelation that comes with this. Yes, even if it is text.

What is the point of this feature when it so badly supports any proper workflow?

Only method I found so far that allows me to get 1080p is to add the subtitles from scratch. No importing can be done.

But adding 300 captions by hand with new timing everytime I need to translate a video? That is insane.

So, open captions is next to useless still. What do other people do? I use Windows 10.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    E
    EmberRegisGroupLtd.
    Participant
    November 16, 2016

    Same, when I import a .srt file that I created myself, it comes in at a 720 x 480 resolution. How do I import it in HD? Do I just scale to frame size?

    habitofseeing
    habitofseeing
    Participating Frequently
    November 11, 2016

    Same problem with 720x480 here: Problems converting Closed Captions to Open Captions in Premiere 2015.4

    I also tried in CC 2017, no update on this.

    S
    sBirchAuthor
    Known Participant
    November 16, 2016

    Well, this means that Adobe Premiere Pro is NOT A USEFUL PRODUCT when it comes to subtitling workflows that involves the de facto industry standard subtitling. Or did I miss something?

    So, what do people then use? If you have to subtitle a lot of stuff with translated captions, how do you do this without going insane? The only way I can see through this is to enter by hand each and every caption, including timing, in the Open Captions pane in Premiere PRo. But this process is so broken that I don't even want to try and start it.

    What would Adobe Staff do themselves if they were asked to add 300 open captions delivered as a SRT file to a 25 minute 1080p video?

    J
    johnathanm36740107
    Participant
    November 17, 2016

    Pulling my hair out over here.

    Originally I was having the scaling issue with the subs coming in at 720x480. I could still edit them on the left to make the font bigger, one at a time, but it was mysteriously cutting off the sides of each line, and no matter what I changed couldn't fix it. It was also changing any Spanish characters to * for whatever reason, even though I had a font selected that supported spanish characters. That was an .srt file. Still, in the captions panel the timing and text was visible.

    I saw that the newest version of Premier CC had upgraded captions features so thought maybe they'd figured it out. Nope. It actually seems less functional than the previous version. when I import and then select a caption file it no longer shows up in the captions panel. Changes there don't seem to make a difference. I watched a tutorial that explained that captions could be edited right in the timeline, but couldn't get that to work either. Then a mysterious bug started appearing. Once I dropped the captions file on the timeline and clicked elsewhere, a mysterious second copy of the captions would appear in the track right above the original. For no reason that I can determine.

    I read somewhere that the Mac captions format is the only one that supports HD sized captions without scaling. So I tried that. Except when I place that in the timeline the spaces between characters are huge for some reason- making the captions really difficult to read. Oh, and I still don't see text in the captions panel when its selected.

    There are so many issues here that as far as I can tell the subtitles/captions features in Premier pro are entirely useless. I ultimately was trying to burn the captions into the video on export. If anybody knows of software that can handle this very simple task please let me know.

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