Positioning WebVTT closed caption lines. (In TextEdit)

Report · Nov 21, 2019

So, apologies, this isn't exactly a Premiere thing but relates and could possibly be useful to remembers of this community.

I am testing the positioning information of WebVTT files used for closed captioning on YouTube. In the demonstrative example video provided below, I've captioned the video myself by editing a WebVTT file with "TextEdit" on a Mac.

Test video: https://youtu.be/h300uF_Djcc

All I did to my file was reposition the caption lines to display at 2 different heights in the screen. I did not make any changes to the first or last line, but I did change the position of all of the other lines to the same thing. I set all of these lines to what should be the same position by adding "line:70%" after the timing information in the file.

Now, if you look closely you'll notice some differentials.

Ignoring the first and last lines, you'll notice that the other lines seem to be positioning near eachother but in 2 slightly different locations. The lines that are shorter seem to display higher and the longer lines display lower even though all of my captions are single lines and contain the same positioning information. Does anyone know why this could be?

Report · Nov 22, 2019

Good info. No idea why the very small difference in short vs longer captions.

Note that there is a uservoice request (bug report/feature request system) to add webvtt as export option from PR.

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/34884754-export-captions-as...

You can also adjust the left/right alignment of titles in webvtt by using the "position" command. So, for example, the top/right quadrant is position:80% line:20%. The default is (left/right) position:50%; (top/bottom) line:80%. So leaving those out gets those values.

Your tests shows that absolute positioning in possible by putting in values other than the 9 standard positions. But the small variation is a problem.

Stan