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James353365324886
Participant
September 7, 2025
Question

Subtitle timings are off after export a specific clip

  • September 7, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 611 views

I have a long video that I break up in to smaller clips - essentially chapters. 

When I am exporting these out, the subtitle SRT timestamps align with the full original video, not the specific clip I have extracted and therefore do not match up at all.

 

I can't find a way to fix this.

 

For example, lets say I have a 15 minute video and I am wanting to export the middle 5 minutes, the time stamps in the SRT file will start at 00:05:00:00 in relation to the full video as opposed to starting at 00:00:00:00 in alignment with the actual clip I have exported.

 

This seems really silly and I am possibly missing something obvious but are unable to work out why it will not align the timestamps to the extracted clip.

 

 

1 reply

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Stan JonesCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 7, 2025

@James353365324886,

 

You can submit an Idea/feature request, but it is really working as designed. This question was asked in 2021 not long after the new caption workflow was introduced, but I don't see a feature request.

 

Yes, when setting in/out markers to export part of a sequence, the sidecar export will keep the timecodes from the sequence, not the in/out segment starting at zero.

 

I see 2 workarounds.

 

1 - Use a third party tool to edit the srt and adjust the timecodes so they start at zero.

 

2 - Once the sequence is done and ready for exports, duplicate the sequence, set the first out point, and export with sidecar. Then, for each export file segment, target all layers (including captions if you are cutting mid-caption), and cut the video at that "old" out point.  Drag select all the tracks and captions from the previous export, and ripple delete. Then set the new out point and repeat. The exports will all start at zero.

 

Does that work for you as a workaround?

 

Stan

 

 

 

 

 

J
James353365324886Author
Participant
September 8, 2025

Thanks Stan. I'll definately put that forward as a suggestion because it does seem odd it does work correctly and timestamps do not align.

As for the work arounds - they are what I already suspected but was hoping there would be an actual solution or a more efficient way. Across 3 videos we're probably talking 50+ exports, they all then have to be re-uploaded individually so reality is a lot of work to make them correct using workarounds. I may just have to exlcude the subtitles or chip away at them bit by bit. 

Appreciate you commenting though and confirming that I am not missing something obvious.

Mathias Moehl
Community Expert
Mathias MoehlCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 8, 2025

How exactly do you determine which parts of the sequence you export?

I just wrote a tool for the Community Library of Automation Blocks Pr for you, which applies an offset to a single SRT file:

File Handling/SRT/Add Time Offset to SRT File.xml


Just load the xml block script into Automation Blocks and in the inputs panel choose
- an input SRT file

- an output SRT file 
- a time offset in seconds
Then run the tool and it will create the output SRT file with the desired time offset.

If you want to create some kind of batch processing to manipulate many SRT files at once, the script will be a good starting point (as any Automation Blocks tool, it can be fully customized). Main question for further automation is how the tool should know the names of the different files and their offsets (maybe you have those in a spreadsheet or you have markers in your timeline with that info, for example).

Mathias Möhl - Developer of tools like BeatEdit and Automation Blocks for Premiere Pro and After Effects
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