Premiere Pro Captions to Amazon Prime Video Encoding Error

[default98dkqxa9e60r]

I've created captions in Premiere Pro for a short film and trying to upload them to Amazon Prime Video, but Amazon keeps telling me the captions can't be encoded and giving me this error message: 

"NO MATCH found between font Attributes Pattern \s+(color|face|size)\s*=\s*["'](.*)["']\s* and tag attributes: color=#AAAAAAFF

Please remove the #AAAAAAFF throughout the captions"

The problem is I'm not getting this error message within Premiere Pro, the captions seem fine on my end, and it's not clear how to fix this #AAAAAAFF issue. Can anyone help? Adobe tech support was stumped, and Amazon does not assist with troubleshooting. I've tried exporting the captions as a 608 srt, 708 srt, open captions, xml, all result in the same error message from Amazon. 

[Stan Jones]

I only have a moment... This can become very complicated, and I know only a bit about the Amazon Prime requirements.

From a post I made some time back. It was from the "old" captions (PR 2020 and earlier). But I suspect that will including color in exported sidecars, this may be the same. I have not tested.

• When you export the srt from PR, are you checking the box for "styling"? It will export font color, but NOT background.
• PR is exporting 8 character Hex color. For example, in PR, if I open the color picker for caption text and check the "Only Web colors" box, the bottom right color for red (see the "# xxxx" box to the right) is #E00000. If I deselect that box, I may get something like #F7061B. But when PR exports the srt, it is adding 2 more characters and showing 8-digit hex - the last two being transparency. So, for example, #FF0000FF.
• Using VLC player, I find that it will ignore non-Web colors with the added "FF." It will take 6-digit hex, even if non-web. And it will take 8-digit if web color only.

This can be edited outside of PR, depending on what type of styling you need to carry in your sidecar.

Stan

[default98dkqxa9e60r]

Hi Stan,

Thanks for taking the time. Forgive me, the information you shared is a little over my head and I'm not sure I understand what I should do to fix the problem. When I export the srt from PR, I'm not seeing a box for styling, though I do see what you're saying about the color picker. I'm assuming that checking the "Only Web Colors" box for each caption is not the way to go? Is there something I can do within PR, or do I have to edit outside of it? 

Ben

[Stan Jones]

What version of PR are you using? The export methods changed in PR 2021 (version 15.x). 

Stan

[default98dkqxa9e60r]

I'm using 2018 version 12.1.2.

[Stan Jones]

Okay; thanks. This is a guess on my part as to what Amazon wants, and there can be other issues even if you fix this one. But let's start there. Also, note that we don't usually hear back from users that have asked about Amazon Prime submissions. Most who succeed appear to use a service to get their captions correct.

If you are getting font codes in srt export, it must be because you have modified the font/background color in one or more captions, true?

2018 has no option for not including styling. But now that I have tested, it probably does not matter! Either a) you need the styling because you need the font or background color edits (see below), or b) you can get rid of the edits that are causing you to include the styling information, and PR will export a clean srt. 

If you need those color edits, you'll need to edit the srt. It does not matter whether you use web colors or not.

So, a typical caption with color information line looks something like:

00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,986
<font color=#8F1010FF>Type Caption Text Here</font>

The "usual" font color code does not include the last 2 F's, which are probably Adobe's way of passing opacity information. VLC will use the caption file just fine; it appears to ignore the last 2 characters.

You can "fix" this by editing each font code and removing the last 2 F's. So it would look like this:

00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,986
<font color=#8F1010>Type Caption Text Here</font>

Let us know how it goes!

Stan

[default98dkqxa9e60r]

Thanks very much for the suggestions.

I have not modified the font color in any captions, at least not intentionally.

If I click on the color picker for a caption, the text color is #AAAAAA, background color is #000000, and edge color is #232323. I haven't gone through the codes within color picker for every single caption, but I haven't done anything to adjust font colors so I'm guessing these codes are the same for every caption. I'm not seeing F's in the # box within the color picker, so I'm not sure how to remove them. Is there a way to check/edit the font codes by another means than the color picker that might uncover these Fs?

Ben

[Stan Jones]

If you are exporting .srt and it has font information, you must have modified something.

You can't tell anything by the color picker; it is only on export that PR adds the extra information. And tha is why it must be edited out there (if you need it).

Sending you a PM.

Stan

[default98dkqxa9e60r]

Understood. Sounds good, thanks.

[Stan Jones]

The srt has a combination of  grey (AAAAAA) and black (000000). In PR 2018, I changed to all grey and get an srt with the grey font code. I changed to all white and I get srt with no font codes.

If you need the font colors, I can explain how to edit the srt to remove the final FF's.

Stan