Open Captions not saving changes or saving renders

[michaelw64976101]

I am working with Chinese and English open captions on Premiere (Chinese and English on each slide). Often (but not always), when I render and save, then quit, I will reopen the project to find that my rendering to my captions has not saved, and that any changes I've made to subtitles have not updated and saved. I'm stuck back on some old version of the subtitles that I don't want anymore.

I've been assured by an Adobe rep that this is impossible, but it keeps happening over and over and over. I know I am saving my work super-regularly, because I have issues with the stability of the program and it often crashes. Other parts of the project seem to save without issue - titles, other aspects of editing - but not the subtitles.

Every Adobe rep has checked my computer and software specs and has not been able to assist me.

[kulpreet singh]

Hi Michaelw64976101,

I am sorry that you are facing trouble saving Open captions in Premiere Pro.

I checked your account details & I can see that your last interaction (with our support team) got disconnected without troubleshooting.

I request you to the support team again and refer to this case# 0189384757

FAQ: How do I contact Adobe Support?

Thanks,

Kulpreet Singh

[andryh27333591]

I have this problem too, i edit my open caption color from white to yellow then i save. when i re-open. it back to before i edited with white color. it happen sometimes not always. But its quite irritating for me

thnks,

[beardo9973]

Same here.

[berberv17868043]

I got the same problem!
I'm translating Spanish interviews with open captions. When I close and reopen the project after saving, sometimes the captions I added are gone while all other edits are saved. Anything that can be done about it?

[BottledLightsPhotography]

Same here. Lost 8 hours of work - even though I regularly saved my project, even occasionally as new project files. Also the auto save files only contain captions for a few minutes. All gone!

This is not supposed to happen! Never ever! Especially with software that expensive.

Adobe, this really sucks!

Edit:

Now I tried exporting the captions as .srt on a regular basis. This noes not work neither: The export only contains captions until a certain timestamp (~ 8 minutes), everything added after that time is not in the .srt file.

It's impossible to save the file with captions, it's impossible to export the captions - so what am I supposed to do?

[Elisabetta2254951639ij]

I lost two days of work.

Made changes on 80' interview subtitles, and when opened the project again no changes were there!!!

The program was saving automatically every 10' but what for???

Please tell me what to do! Premiere Pro is expensive enough!

[Mr_mpeg]

I just lost five hours of work and i need to explain it to my client now... i'm pissed beyond words!

I saved the program and after reopening in one timeline all the changes i made to my open captions were

gone. in the other timeline it was saved correctly. WTF?

[juancastilla]

Same here, very frustrating, did a good amount of subtitles and now they are all gone except the first 5-8 lines.  I checked all the autosaves but none having any saves of the subtitles on them.  So much time and work lost.  Who´s going to make up for that time and work?  And adobe just raised their fees.  ?????????

[juancastilla]

It´s quite ridiculous that I have to use another program to make the subtitles because I cannot trust adobe premiere with this as is not saving them. Adobe team , can you please help us fix this problem?

[Michael_Chen_Hilton]

In an earlier version of the project, I had many individual subtitle/captions elements (one for each language that was translated) and a couple of them just wouldn't save the changes so I had SimonSay.ai create a single long .srt and made changes to that, but now after saving and re-opening many changes are not saving. 

All the text changes to open captions saved, but none of the trimming/nudging/realigning/timing. The timing that I realigned and saved "drifts" by roughly 8 frames, then 12 frames, then 24 frames as the sequence continues. By 1.5 hours into the sequence, it is off by five seconds or more. 

I would be "satisfied" with knowing the exact way in which I should expect this function *not* to work so I could work around it (e.g., "subtitling MUST be done in a single session, otherwise, change cannot be expected to be saved" or even "We've abandoned this feature and suggest you use _______ program for it which is more standard"). 

14.8.0 (build 39). Mac. 

Very few stability issues in general and in a previous version of premiere subtitles/captions could not be changed with the mouse on the sequence (only with the internal caption time code). Once that started working again in this new version of Premiere I started trusting captions/subtitles again and they worked very well when I only had five minutes of an interview that needed them.

[Stan Jones]

The drift is observed in the PR timeline or on export? If in the timeline, it does not align at all, or after reopening the project they are wrong?

Open Captions or ?

Stan

[Michael_Chen_Hilton]

Hi Stan, 

The drift initially happened in the export. It was extremely bad exporting from Media Encoder, and then I found much less bad in Premiere (good enough people reviewing the cut could finally forgive it and watch it without complaining). 

Open Captions. 

After getting that export out, the drift started happening in the PR timeline. I had edited some scenes, saved, and then re-opened to edit more and the Open Captions had drifted drastically again (15 seconds difference by the end... enough difference that I tested if the captions didn't respond properly to ripple delete and the (A) track select forward but in the simple tests I did they moved properly. 

Obviously didn't see your reply and moved on from the project for a couple weeks, but will be back in it before the end of the month if all goes well. I really like how well SimonSays.ai generates transcriptions, but wondering if using the new Premiere transcription function internally will eliminate any drift... a bit of a superstitious hope, oh well. 

[Stan Jones]

Keep us informed on your work.... The new caption workflow has some reports of timecode issues, but it is new to us all.

Stan

[Michael_Chen_Hilton]

Hi, 

Update. Haven't started any mission-critical work on subtitles yet... but sharing anyway that...

Two days ago I rendered and locked all the tracks for myself personally for safety while doing the last few watches/edits before a picture lock I'll add subtitles to to make it easier for the rest of the team to watch...

I've completely ignored the subtitle track, but of course there was one section in this last pass that would be perfectly lined up if I just dragged that section's subtitles a few seconds to the right so I did it/cut the section in two and unenabled the second section that was no longer needed, locked every track up again, saved, and restarted. 

Every click I made before and after that subtitle changes saved/reopened perfectly (an hour of work before and a few hours after), but even in a locked track the subtitles for that section moved back and the cut I made either moved to a different place by ten frames or a subtitle within it moved ten frames b/c the cut is now in a nonsensical spot. 

I didn't really "lose" any work per se, but after this happenstance/experiment I am now wondering again what the best subtitle workflow is... it'd be very helpful to add them in the next couple days so they're present for the "speak now or forever hold your peace" for everyone before we flatten it to send it out to color/sound. 

All the best,

[cameraclay]

I just started using open captions and it has been the most frustrating Adobe experience to date. I began by duplicating captions on the timeline and altering the duplicate in th eproject panel but the program was moving very slowly and kep producing errors. For example, I would duplicate a caption, change the text, then find the previous captions text changed as well. Sometimes it was like a dominio effect where 3 or 4 captions were now shifted over with a duplicate caption between them. As a workaround, I stopped duplicating captions and just created a new caption for each subtitle. This seemed to work for a few minutes. The program was more responsive and I was actually getting work down. A few minutes later, the program was sluggish again and started earsing my work, duplicating captions... nightmare all over again. Adobe truly is shameless. I am wasting hours of my life here.

[Stan Jones]

cameraclay,

What specific version of PR are you running? At least one user reported imporovement in the newest version (22.2.0).

The most consistent workaround was NOT working in the Text Panel, but in the Program Monitor.

See this thread:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/captions-timeline-slowing-computer-to-a-craw...

Stan