Tips & Techniques for Subtitles and Captions

[R Neil Haugen]

So far, the new Captions/Subtitle improvements with the Speech-to-Text are a huge improvement for my workflow.

That said ... I want to go faster always. I want more control. And I'm hitting some frustrations.

Splitting Subtitle/Captions Block

So ... I've got a cursor in a text segment in the Captions panel. I want to split that text segment at that point. But when I click the "split captions" option, it simply makes two segement blocks of the complete text block.

Doubling the text, not splitting it. Am I missing something?

Moving/Shifting Text Blocks on the Sequence

There are times when I just want to move the text back a bit ... all future text segments also. The track-forward select tool is handy. But if I forget to lock everything down in the video/audio tracks before doing a move, well ... yea, that's not what I want.

So what is the niftiest way to grab all future text blocks and move them back or bring forward a bit?

Multiple Line Blocks and Line-Breaks

I'm doing mostly multiple line blocks, and Premiere Pro breaks them up oddly quite often. Like below ...

But when I have multiple

text blocs

on multiple lines it behaves really weird.

And I can't seem to get it to change where it's 'breaking' the text. Why does the middle line have only two short words and the top and bottom lines are longer. Help?

Any questions or comments on the above or any other aspect of using the Subtitle/Captions process is most welcome in this thread!

Neil

[R Neil Haugen]

And ... @Stan Jones @Ann Bens @Averdahl and @John T Smith among others, give me some schooling!

Neil

[Averdahl]

I never do subtitling in Premiere Pro, so my knowledge in that area is close to zero 🙂

The few times i do for short segments i still use After Effects so i can control the transpareny of the black background.

[Stan Jones]

> so i can control the transpareny of the black background.

Give it a spin sometime. There is a separate opacity control for the background (which PR's caption tool had previously) but several additional controls for the background; and a new shadow option. For Subtitles (the old Open Captions), all the EGP options are available - and some are new for regular text and captions.

There are still things you can get only in AE or by creating individual graphics text.

Stan

[Stan Jones]

Splitting: That is the current functioning. I remember a lot of discussion in the Beta forum regarding how to calculate etc. Part of this function is just right: the position of the CTI determines the timecodes for the split.

Note that the shortcuts (unmapped) for split and merge are still not working in 15.4, but they are in the current Beta (22.0 Build 31 for me). The keyboard shortcuts can be a real timesaver.

Moving segments forward/backward without disrupting other tracks: I don't use that tool, and it appears to operate the opposite of the guide explanation: the default selects all tracks; Shift-click selects one track. Then switch to the selection arrow and move. My sequences are generally short enough that I just marquee drag.

Multiple Blocks and Line Breaks: I assume you are talking about multiple Text Blocks within a single Caption Segment, and that those have multiple lines? I need clarificaiton on that. The default (which can't be changed) is for each block to wrap when the line length goes outside the Caption boundary - which can be adjusted some. Hitting "enter" will start a new line.

Stan

[R Neil Haugen]

That splitting behavior is just ... wrong. Why would we EVER want to completely duplicate an entire text block, THEN have to edit both blocks!

As to moving ... I've found that at times as I'm adjusting text to fit the screen, and pull one shorter, make one longer ... the following ones can end up not actually correctly placed.

So I'm trying to sort out the behavior as somehow, things I'm not touching are getting moved.

Neil