How to move all captions at once? (Premiere Pro 14.9 and earlier)

You can see in this video how to move multiple acption items: How to move multiple captions in Premiere Pro

I spent hours scratching my head over this. There's a simple answer

To ripple shift everything to the RIGHT, option + cmd click on edge of caption you want to move down. 

If you want to move everything to the LEFT, simply create a dummy caption in the space you want to ripple delete, stretch the caption out to the length you want to delete, then right click and choose ripple delete!!!

Nice. Thanks. It is convoluted and unintuitive, but is the only thing that worked!

Thanks for posting this. I just tested. A little confusing. I think the chat person is wrong about what the history panel calls "Ripple Update Caption." The snap to CTI is interesting: if you drag the end of a caption to the right (make it longer), and you get close to the CTI, the end snaps. If you drag it to the left, it ignores the CTI, so you can place it as you wish. I did not know that!

EXTENDING the caption stream, which is what was discussed in this thread, is working in 2020.2.0.  And when I tested (for the first time) REDUCING the caption stream, it also works. But reducing has a different set of problems I'll discuss below. I tested Open Captions and Closed  608. They appear to work the same.

My method: Select the caption stream in the timeline. Select an individual caption. (That caption gets grey.) You must hold the Ctrl (Cmd) key down before clicking on the end of the caption to drag. If you press Ctrl after you click, it operates as if Ctrl was not down. When you hover over the end of the caption, you see the red "bracket and arrow" drag symbol. (Cannot get a screenshot!) When you press Ctrl down, the red bracket arrow turns to white. When you drag the end of a caption (with or without Ctrl), you see a little line in the timecode ruler area, and you see the caption adjusting as you drag. Once you get to another caption, the caption stops adjusting, but the little line continues. When you release the click, if you did NOT have Ctrl pressed down, the caption stops at the next caption. If you had Ctrl down, the caption extends to the release point, and the captions to the right ripple adjust.

This works the same dragging to the left. Except that it only changes up to the beginning of that caption. And even if you drag past the caption to the left, all that happens is the caption you are dragging is deleted, and the captions to the right ripple left - by that small amount.

Workaround. If you have no captions in the area to be removed, just create one long caption in that area, and then Ctrl-drag the end of that caption left as discussed. If you already have more or less continuous captions, something has to be deleted or otherwise changed. So this depends on the details - are some captions kept and other deleted, etc. Let's assume it is a large block to be deleted. I could not see a way to do it in the timeline, but in the Caption Panel, click on the first caption to be deleted, shift click the NEXT to last, and hit Delete. Now in the Timeline, extend the next to last to the left and Ripple adjust it and voila!

Second Workaround. Once we discovered that you can export Open Captions from the sequence, this also allows cutting out chunks of the caption stream, exporting the captons, and reimporting. All the captions must be in the same video layer, but don't have to be in the same caption stream.

Stan

Just on the chat window to Adobe now. They removed this feature in 2020. So, if you want captions to (sort of) work, stick to 2018.

2020 does have the capacity to snap the end of captions to the playhead, which 2018 does not. But if you're using 2020 and you remove 5 seconds of footage from a 60-minute clip you need to drag every. single. caption. One at a time, to reposition them.

genius! you saved me a day of work! thanks a lot

Thanks Stan, This solved exactly what I needed to do as well. 

Try this: How to move multiple captions in Premiere Pro

ahh what a shame, finally the captions can be made to look o.k., but make one edit in your timeline and you have a timing mess!!! it's possible to select more subtitles, but then you can't drag them, what a pain......

why not make it possible to cut the caption track, just like any other video, and then be able to combine them together again, with the timing points of the sequence/timeline? that should be quite easy to program.

so either multi-select and drag ("rubber band" please, not select each individually with mouse), or cut the track as desired and then weld/combine again with good timing. that would be superb and make this a very good subtitle editing tool too.

david