Things that need improvement in making captions

[Kees Veling]

Hi, i have found that the  "make captions from transcript"does not work as it should, making some obvious errors.

-The caption maker does not seem to look at where clips end and start. It will conflate/put together sentences from two different persons from different clips.
-When breaking long sentences with a line break it does not make an attempt to make both lines the same lenth. It does not use comma's as a logical place to add a line break.

-When you razor a caption clip and edit the text in on half, the trough edit stays alltohough the clips are different. It should wotk like Alt+s (Split caption)
-A common workflow is to export to .srt, open that in word as a text file, use word to correct spelling and grammar or have a client give input.

But then you cannot reimport an srt or txt file exported from word into premiere as the format is not recognized.  The workaround is to use subtitle edit (nixe.de) to open and safe the file witout altering it, after that premiere will import it with timing.  So premiere does not import legit srt files for some reason if they come from word and are saved as .txt.  This is probably an encoding mismatch but premiere should be less fussy and just import it i think.

Windows 11 pro 22H2 22621.3007 Premiere Pro  24.1.0 Build 85

[Stan Jones]

Kees,

Thanks for submitting those examples of captioning problems. They can be useful to staff.

> But then you cannot reimport an srt or txt file exported from word into premiere as the format is not recognized. So premiere does not import legit srt files for some reason if they come from word and are saved as .txt. This is probably an encoding mismatch but premiere should be less fussy and just import it i think.

Your edit in Word should work. As you know, the problem with editing in Word is that it uses many “invisible characters” that will mess up your captions. Yes, saving as a .txt file should remove these, but you also must look at encoding. If you are using the UTF-8 encoding, you/your editor may be introducing other errors if it does not import correctly. For example, adding an extra empty line or changing the format of one timecode entry will create problems. If PR won't import it, it is probably NOT a legit srt file.

I used the following process and the revised .srt opened correctly in PR 24.1.

Change srt to txt and open in Word. When prompted for encoding, it should show UTF-8.
Make edits.
When saving as txt, you should again be prompted for encoding, use UTF-8.
Change name from .txt to .srt.

> The workaround is to use subtitle edit (nixe.de) to open and safe the file witout altering it, after that premiere will import it with timing.

I like Subtitle Edit as a very useful tool.

Another alternative is using the new text-based editing, correcting the transcript, and using the "import corrected transcript" process. But those changes are all before the captioning segmentation and the problems you describe in your post.

Stan

[Kees Veling]

Thanks for the suggestion, i did not know of the "import corrected transcript" function. It wil not solve this issue but is a good thing to look at.

You write: "If PR won't import it, it is probably NOT a legit srt file." I argue that this is a fault of the premiere importer being not good enough as the "subtitle edit" importer will import the same file without problems or errors. It might be that this only works for my favorite laguages english and dutch though as they use a limited character set.

[Stan Jones]

Yes, there's a lot more functionality that would be welcome in the sidecar input/export areas.

Stan