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Inspiring
June 5, 2022
Question

SCC captions appearing early in Premiere Pro playback

  • June 5, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 2256 views

I have created scc files for three decades for my clients using Swift Create. Recently, I thought I would try playing back my captions in Premiere Pro.  I loaded one of my SCC caption files in Premiere Pro and found that all the captions appeared early on playback (a minimum of a half-second early, sometimes earlier).

 

After investigating, I discovered the reason for this:

 

Premiere Pro was using the SCC times as APPEAR times.  However, scc times are not appear times, they are the times when the viewer's encoder needs to start generating the caption.  For instance, my file has a musical note that is timed to appear at the 11th frame of the film.  But Premiere Pro displays it at the SCC file's 00:00 mark, which is actually the time when the encoder on the viewer's end should start GENERATING the caption with the musical note, NOT the time when the caption with the musical note should appear on the screen.

 

I'm sure there must be a way to get Premiere Pro to emulate an encoder for broadcast captions so that scc files play in sync with the audio..

 

I tried discussing this with a customer rep, but he kept telling me that Adobe couldn't help me with my captioning software.  I told him, with respect, that my software has nothing to do with it.  I know my scc files are correct -- if they weren't, I would have been out of business years ago, especially since the timing of cap files has to be frame-perfect in places (for instance, at certain shot changes).

 

The real issue seems to be that there's something that I don't understand about how Premiere Pro works when it comes to displaying scc broadcast captions.

 

A second (but surely less likely) possibility is that Premiere Pro is not designed to display broadcast captions correctly (i.e. with the necessary build-up time) unless the captions were created inside Premiere Pro itself.

 

Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated!

 

Brian

 

PS The customer rep's last suggestion was for me to try loading last year's Premiere Pro.  It was then that I realized I wasn't getting through to him.  That's when I thought I'd try my luck by posting the question here, in the hopes of finding someone who knows a little more about closed captions and Premiere Pro.

 

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 5, 2022

I understand the concept, but my expertise, and testing methods, are limited.

 

Do you still have PR 2020 installed? I am curious as to whether the pre-PR 2021 caption workflow behaved any differently.

 

Stan

 

 

 

777bbbbqAuthor
Inspiring
June 5, 2022

I'm actually using PP 2022 Creative Cloud.  

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 6, 2022

I almost feel like I'm the victim of a practical joke. 

 

PP utterly DESTROYS my scc files:

When I import scc files:

 

Center-justification is changed to left. 

Italics are removed.

Roll-up captions "blend over" into the captions that follow them, creating typos.

Timing is changed so that 2-second caps have less than 20 frames of appear time.

 

It makes me think that PP is not designed to work with real Line 21 scc captions,

just with whatever the user creates inside PP itself.


Regarding roll-up, see this thread where I confirmed that PR 2021 (and 2022) do not display roll-up as the prior versions. It only shows as pop-on.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/premiere-pro-15-0-captions/m-p/12002747#M344087

 

But I since confirmed that PR 2021/22 do export embedded 608 with the roll-up effects. I just reconfirmed this with 2022.4.0.

 

I realize this does not address your issue regarding .scc created in another program and what PR does on import.

 

Stan