Captions Premiere Pro 2021 - Not sure where to post this

[Dan j Francis]

I have been using captions in Premiere Pro for the past few years with SRTs. Imported as a layer I could creatively do what I wanted with them.. rotate them, move them to the bottom but still center justified vertically.

I was so excited for the new features because it looked like that was all going to stay in place, and more.

Instead, Adobe KILLED the functions of captions, and WORSE, removed the legacy option so we are stuck with this 1960s style of captioning.

Another huge issue we have now, is because we make videos in triplicate for our clients, wide, square, and tall, that all use the same SRT, before when we made a correction in 1 version, it auto corrected them all because it was an asset treated like footage instead of an individual, timeline specific entity. Now we have to make changes in all 3 versions and Adobe has killed our profit margins due to this extra time.

Where can we give feedback to show the programmers, who are not artists so they have no idea what we need, the things that artists & editors need for full creative control.

I feel like we went backwards in a very devistating way and I just cannot comprehend why we cannot check a box in preferences that we want SRTs as a timeline layer instead of as a Text Graphic.

Can someone please help guide me to where I can give feedback input? I'd be happy to provide video overview of workflows and where the bottlenecks are, etc.

Thanks in advance,
Dan j Francis

[Kevin-Monahan · Accepted solution]

Hi Dan,
Give feedback here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro

Thanks,
Kevin

[Stan Jones]

Hi Dan,

An important change in the new caption workflow, as you point out, is that the caption Track is no longer a Video Track, and you cannot apply effects to it, such as position and opacity. A huge change and, as you, many users want their old workarounds back.

But I think you can center vertically. There are actually more controls, and the "regular" caption controls (as opposed to the video track effect controls used in the past) now allow you to get lower on the screen - 95% as opposed to pre-2021 captions 90%. In 2021, as you show in your screenshot, you actually have vertical paragraph controls - which did not exist in pre-2021 captions. BUT these work relative to the bounding box - which is not always visible.

It is addressed in the reference guide in the "change text position" section: "Change the text box size: If you want to shrink or expand the text box size you can do this through Set Horizontal Scale and Set Vertical Scale. This will affect text wrapping and paragraph align settings. You can also change the text. box size using the text box controls on the Program Monitor.” [The actual tool tip in PR 2021 is actually Set Horizontal Size, not Scale.]

Yes, that little "affect text wrapping and paragraph align settings" is big. The vertical center is the bounding box. Set your text box to the maximum size you will need - for example 3 lines. The bottom of the text/bounding box is the limit on how low you can move the captions.

FYI, for some purposes, you can next the caption sequence to burn in with additional contorl over postion, opacity, etc. See this post where I discuss options for using nesting to workaround this problem for burned in captions. But it is a workaround and will not fix many of the problems that concern you.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/faq-workaround-nesting-to-apply-effect-controls-to-capti...

Stan

[R Neil Haugen]

Some things are vastly improved in the new workflow, and some are at this time shafted. Yea.

In general, for many users like me that only need one setup for captioning, this is a vastly improved process. In shops like yours, it certainly ain't. And for most all of us, it needs more and different options than it's got now.

So yes, give 'em feedback.

And actually, one of the best places to do so as the engineers view this as a work in process is their Public Beta forums. There's a number of threads there on this, and on that forum, the engineers DO participate.