is there a way to export a webvtt file for captions.

[Michael Grenadier]

Mainly concerned about maintaining position info from Premiere.   Not averse to manually entering the info in another program if necessary as most of the captions will be sitting at the bottom of the frame...  but there are a few places with titles from the original film and additional subtitles for a few places that have non-english dialog...  And if anyone can recommend a program that will make this process easier, it'd be appreciated.  

[Michael Grenadier · Accepted solution]

figured I'd update this thread with my attempts to work thru this issue.    I finally figured out how to manually adjust the web vtt file to adjust vertical position...  If anyone wants the specific workflow, post back and I'll go in to the details...

First, let me go in to a little more detail about my specific situation.  I'm supervising the restoration of a documentary from the 80's and my original contract included authoring blu-ray and dvd...  After much "tsuris" I was able to get Encore 6 working on my mac...  as I had a license for Premiere 6 for the mac (not for windows unfortunately).    When I was testing caption workflow from Premiere to Encore, I discovered that the position information was not there in the .srt file I was exporting from premiere... but since there really were maybe 20 or 30 places where I needed to adjust vertical position, I figured that manually adjusting vertical position of captions in Encore was doable...  (not going in to any of the details of the adjustments I needed to make to get the .srt file to import into encore - not simple).  

Now we come to the latest wrinkle...  There is a film festival play at the end of January.  Besides a live event screened from a DCP, there will also be streaming available which requires captioning...    Decided to test the workflow using my vimeo account.  Vimeo's interface in many ways is a nightmare.  They often change the interface in what seems to me illogical ways with insufficient details available in help...  They do supposedly accept web vtt files for captions, but when I did a short test, the captions did not appear.  When I reached out to support, it took a couple of days before they admitted that web vtt files with formatting information DID NOT work at all....   great huh?  Youtube will accept a web vtt file and in intial tests did reflect the changes I made in the web vtt file to reposition specific captions vertically.    Waiting to here from the film festival about their streaming platform and what's possible with the formatting...

So that's where I stand now...    if anyone wants specific instructions on how to manually adjust formatting for individual captions in a web vtt file, post back...

[Michael Grenadier]

and did a short test with the film festival and the web vtt file with vertical position adjusted seems to be working fine.  Of course, things are never simple.  The way the captions are displayed differs between chrome, firefox and safari...  Client's just gonna have to live with this particular wrinkle...

[AmandaBaum]

I'd love to hear your workthrough

[Michael Grenadier]

I used this

https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit

Not sure if the online version can do this, but there is a windows version which is what I used.  This was done last December so I can't remember all the details, but should be pretty straightforward.  If I remember correctly, I tweaked the captions in Premiere and then exported an .srt file which opened in subtitleedit and changed the format to vtt and adjusted vertical position where needed....

[AmandaBaum]

and did it pull the code for font or positioning or anything?

[Stan Jones]

Let' see what Michael says.

But I think that PR's srt export includes ONLY font color of the Subtitle styling  you can set (e.g. font color, family, position, and background). So that is all that can be passed on.

Prior to PR 2022, you could export .stl from a Subtitle stream, and that included more style. But that option was removed. I still do not understand that.

Stan

[Michael Grenadier]

honestly, I don't remember.  But SubtitleEdit has all those options but you'll need to test your workflow...  I was luckly that the people at Film at Lincoln Center were willing to run multiple tests to make sure the formatting was correct for the streaming...    If I remember correctly, not all platforms would read the formatting properly...  I know I tested Vimeo and maybe youtube...  without much luck.