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semiller-holvan
Inspiring
March 29, 2016
Answered

.srt caption file imports as 720x480 and I need it at 1920x1080 (Premiere Pro 14.9 or earlier)

  • March 29, 2016
  • 12 replies
  • 41172 views

Hi all,

 

I've been experimenting with YouTube's closed caption creation tools and using 3rd party downloaders to extract the .srt file from the video.

Even if I download the 1080P version of the video, the caption file gets interpreted by Premiere as a 720x480 and when I export the video, the captions get cut off...

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks!

 

*steve

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Flavio_St

    Hello Tinac,

    Sorry for the frustration. We do understand a good many of our customers need to create Open Captions reliably. Please submit any feature requests or bugs here.

    Thanks,
    Kevin


    I have come to bring the solution to this, not even the Adobe guys knows this I'm sure.

    You know the commands set to frame size and scale to frame size? There's actually a different behavior to them. I'm sure we all use set to frame size so we can have a better control of the scale of our clips, but try using these two with your captions on the timeline.

    Set to frame size, scales the letters horribly, but Scale to frame size... chan! that does it! it actually changes the text sixe of the captions without breaking it! works with HD and 4K as well.

    That's it, I'm the --... I deserve a full life time free creative cloud subscription....

    Mod note: please do not use profanity, it's against our guidelines.

    12 replies

    Show previous replies
    habitofseeing
    habitofseeing
    Participating Frequently
    November 11, 2016

    Same problem here: Problems converting Closed Captions to Open Captions in Premiere 2015.4

    petergaraway
    Adobe Employee
    petergaraway
    Adobe Employee
    November 22, 2016

    Hi All,

    I've tried to find similar post so that I can provide some insight. Unfortunately, I do not have a solution (yet) to this problem. I’ve looked into solutions within Premiere and 3rd party tools and didn’t find anything useful. I spoke with some folks from the team who worked on implementing captions. To give a little background on how/why this was implemented the way it was.

    “It is somewhat intentional. To shoehorn the notion of captions into the video clip/track workflow, we had to treat things as if it were a special type of video media. As such, video often implies a specific number of pixels horizontally, and a certain number of pixels vertically. So the following defaults are in place:

    ·         CEA-608 = DV NTSC (e.g. 720x480)

    ·         CEA-708 = DV NTSC or DV NTSC Widescreen depending on the widescreen flag set in CEA-708

    ·         EBU Teletext = DV PAL.

    This was all before the notion of open captions.  Now that we have open captions, the pixel size _does_ matter as it will affect the fidelity of the text. Unfortunately, for an SRT file, there’s no image dimensions in the file to tell us what it should be. It is just timecodes and text.”

    I wish I could provide you guys with a good solution for right now, but I’ve yet to find one. I’ll post back if I do. As we look into how to address this feature, I (we) would love to hear how you think this feature could best be implemented. Please share here or create a feature request or both! http://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

    Best,

    Peter Garaway

      S
      sBirch
      Known Participant
      November 23, 2016

      Hi Peter,

      I know that SRTs do not include any information on size, but how about this:

      Upon import, SRTs are converted to the highest possible video format present in the project?

      Or even better: Allow user to pick a resolution from their Open Captions video stream? I see you do these conditional things on import, such as 5.1 sounds "You need to install an additional codec".

      Or even bestest:

      Allow user to change desired clip resolution of a Open Captions video clip through the Source Settings dialogue found under the Clip menu.

      Now we are at it: Also, allow users to pick a default Font size, background, color and Size in Source Settings. Your implementation does not allow for this, so I end up with imported captions at Arial 18, which is too small and the wrong font. And have to change all 300 captions by hand, one at a time. Dreadful! I might try to see if I can script my way out of it.

        R Neil Haugen
        R Neil Haugen
        Legend
        March 29, 2016

        I would check your process ... especially the 3rd party downloaders that do the extraction. As, if it is 1080, PrPro will see it as 1080.

        You might try "dropping" one of those srt files on MediaInfo, and in the Tree view, see what is actually IN that file ... if it's 480, well ... proof the error is in the extraction software.

        Media Info:        https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

        Neil

        Everyone's mileage always varies ...
        S
        semiller-holvanAuthor
        Inspiring
        March 29, 2016

        Neil,

        Yes, it's 480... but the strange thing is, all it is, is a text file. Seems like if I had a project open that was 1080, then it would be 1080 when it got imported.

        Also strange is that the captions display correctly on screen within the project, they just get messed up after exporting.

        *steve

        S
        semiller-holvanAuthor
        Inspiring
        March 30, 2016

        I would suggest looking to see if it's possible for those to be exported/transcoded or whatever by that software in 1080.

        Also, check your "captions" tab in the export box, to see what options you have there ... I don't have any captions going so my box options aren't available right now, but here's where to look ...

        Neil


        Neil,

        I ended up going into modify>captions>interpret footage and changed the pixel aspect ration from NTSC (.9091) to NTSC Widescreen (1.2121) and that did the trick to get the captions exported properly.

        Thank you for taking the time to help me out today!

        *steve

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