And there you go. The battle is between a nice, pretty display on screen and being able to actually load subtitles, say on a DVD. Those characters work fine in YouTube and if you load the sidecar file with VLC Media Player but the two apps I have that will burn nice captions into the MP4 either ignore the characters - making the captions unacceptable unless you want Caption 88 to read "And soI played for three long days!" (that's a capital I not a lower-case L) and Let's to read Lets - or in the case of Wondershare throw an access violation on receiving the SRT file. It's not a lot of fun.
By the way, the three closely spaced dots are a single character, …, reproducible by holding Alt and typing 0133 on the keypad (not the top row numbers). It's called "Ellipsis" and is in the upper-ASCII set as are the other problem characters here.
Apparently there's a way with some software to specify an SRT file with a higher level of Unicode than UTF-8 (i.e. UTF-16 which incorporates the problem characters). I have yet to get it to work in Handbrake, however. I believe it is that specification that allows the files to work in YouTube and VLC.
Just to try and be helpful - those quotes are known as curly quotes, publisher's quotes or "sixes and nines" (the one on the left is shaped like tiny sixes, the one on the right like tiny nines). Members of the upper ASCII set and UTF-16, they are not in UTF-8 and obviously Premiere is forcing UTF-8 standards on the imported file...but NOT on the natively created one!
excellent ! thank-you, that is helpful. You have given me the ability to create ellipsis. I am trying a few other things, have run out of time, and appears your statement of Premiere forcing UTF-8 standards on imported srt, but allowing UTF-16 standards on native created captions to be correct.
But, how do you get past Caption 81?
Seems that my Premiere limits the UTF-16 to a certain limit, then stops the srt. I can fix a few UTF-16 and recieve a few more captions on new srt import, but as is, my Premiere stops at Caption 81.
‌I will be at my editing machine in about 10 hours and approaching the srt through its txt file and see if I can sneek up on it through the native sample.
apologies to bernd.porr for being excessive into his thread
Edit: and I wonder what monstremoi sent you via Google drive, with respect to any clue on the srt character blockage
edit: edit: woops that was Benrd to monstremoi. Me bad.
Here's the difference (talk about counter-intuitive...): I found an obscure checkbox in VisualSubSync that is above the name of the SRT file and says "Save as UTF-8". Checked the box, resaved the file and this is the result. Appears to work perfectly. This must be why the small file works too. So many undocumented issues. So little warning or error messages...now if I could figure how to get Premiere to burn the text in without looking like a spindly horror show I'd be there.
Good for finding the 'save as UTF-8'. I will travel with my laptop tomorrow and acquire the srt through dropbox, as my browser here is outdated and dropbox non-compatible. Will be interesting to see.
I failed with placing the UTF-16 inside the Premiere natively created, because as soon as it is inside, it corrupts and the only word that shows is This. Only 'This' shows because of the 6's (quotes) before "Red Sea"
I see the curly quotes, publisher's quotes or "sixes and nines", have survived into the 'Save as UTF-8'. I am still Googling for a chart to teach me the keyboard characters for those.
As well as the elipses, made it into your new srt.
One thing though -
Caption 6
00:02:00,520 --> 00:02:06,593
... and I think of our old, deceitful,
good for nothing stove...
only makes it as 32 characters to be
...and I think of our old, dece,
good for nothing stove...
I have exported it to sample its appearance and still looking into the srt
and comment with Caption 6 was caption 'burn in' . I see the difference with 'create sidecar file' which allows the complete caption 6 to be seen. As well as the curly quotes being able to be seen and the font so much more.
I am thinking of my sidecar and how its timing has changed. I used Media Player Classic, which looked for srt, but I opened the scc with 'all files'.
in the monitors in PPRO -- standard 608 and 708 captions enforce a 32 character limit -- including spaces. If you have more than 32 characters / spaces in any line, you will get clipping in that caption line when decoding
I made errors with my above statement with respect to timing and sidecar. I thought I had opened sidecar in Media Player Classic, but must have only seen the scc file and clicked on the src because I cannot replicate. I can only open the src. And as for timing - the src timing opened in Media Player Classic is correct. It is my burn in timing were I errored due to placing my src incorrectly - but I would think that when selecting the srt in the project bin and dragging to 'new item' that Premiere Pro could be capable of placing the srt onto the timeline as per timecode of the srt (not that the timecode of the srt computes with my timecode thinking with the three last digits).
and likely more errors I have made, but bowing down
No worries, a lot of info has passed through here : - ) ... watch out for lines that have more than 32 characters / spaces -- that is an old 'gotcha' when caption drop in transmit in monitors. I have been looking at this area as well, testing with my own files, and with the SRT that we are referring to .. I have a few questions to ask my Dev tomorrow ..
I suspect Premiere enforces the 32-character limit because of required backward-compatibility with CEA-608 where that's a strict requirement. Other software does not have this limitation; after all, we have 16x9 screens which can accommodate more characters than that; the important limitation is what the reader can handle given the display time.
An excellent resource for determining errors in line length etc. is Subtitle Edit, a free utility that checks each line for errors (too short or long duration, too long lines, etc.) and will attempt to fix the errors line-by-line. It allows for slightly longer than 32 characters, but checks and notifies on limits for subtitles rather than closed-captions.
I think the answer for me is to work entirely outside of Premiere on the captions. Clearly, between Media Player Classic, VisualSubSync, Subtitle Edit and Handbrake I have a more robust caption solution than Premiere can now offer. I REALLY hope they clean up their act. I should not have to use free products that do better what I pay monthly rent to Adobe for Premiere to do...at least, after all of this, I know how to get my project done!!!
If anyone at Adobe wants to know what a captioning module should look like, I have found the best around. It's a free, collaborative environment known as Amara, or amara.org. I am building my subtitles in this program. It has a fully interactive timeline and even the ability to add unsynchronized text in the correct order to add as captions later. Error checking (yes, it tests for 32-character length too). Most importantly, one can run the timeline and press up-arrow/down-arrow keys to drop in and stop the next title. All-around marvelous experience. Adobe, here's the challenge: meet or beat this thing and I'll be back editing captions/subtitles in Premiere in a heartbeat.
That is great you found something that works for you -- I took a look at it. Having people get access is the most important thing of all, some deployments work for some better than others. Premiere Pro supports a very wide feature set of both Open Captions and Closed Captions (two very different standards) and we continue to enhance this as we go froward.
When I import Arabic sub SRT file (made in MacCap), it adds a black box behind the text. How can I remove the black background and add a black border to the text? Need to be able to do this for the subs for a feature, so I need a global solution, as opposed to clicking into each title.
When I click to modify the captions, it doesn't give me an option to change the 'Stream Format' or the 'Target Stream Format.' In the display settings, I'm using CEA-708 and Stream Service 1.
PP CC 12.1.0 (Build 186)
With the SRT file, I can send all the files to the top, or all to the bottom, and I can modify them. I figured out how to remove the black background box - I was trying to just do if for one subtitle, but with the SRT, you have to 'Select All' before modifying.
Is there another subtitle file format that holds the comforming of size and position that works well in Premiere, since SRT will not?
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