Subtitles location on screen does not change when exported (Premiere Pro 14.9 and earlier)

[CollinLT11]

Hello,

So I changed the location of the subtitles I had on the screen in premiere pro and I exported it as an srt file and as a sidecar file. When I uploaded it to YouTube attached to the video, the location of the subtitles were still in the middle bottom third of the screen when I moved them elsewhere in Premiere Pro. Why are the subtitles not changing location like I had changed in Premiere Pro?

Thanks!

[ah_photo · Accepted solution]

.SRT files do not maintain positioning information.

If you're looking to upload subtitles that do keep positioning information that is supported by YouTube you could use:

• Scenarist (.SCC) if your content is 29.97fps
• EBU-STL (.STL) if your content is 25fps
• Timed Text Markup Language (TTML - Premiere exports this as a .XML) for other timebases.

[CollinLT11]

Thanks awh11,

What would happen if I exported as an .STL file, but my content is 23.976 fps?

[Andreas Kiel]

You will get wrong timing.

[CollinLT11]

What about Vimeo? I've tried an STL file but it still does not maintain positioning information. With that said, I was only testing if the STL file maintained positioning information since my footage is 23.976fps. I tried exporting an XML but Vimeo does not accept the file format.

[ah_photo]

Per Vimeo:

Vimeo supports the following captions and subtitles file formats: SRT, WebVTT, DFXP/TTML, SCC, and SAMI files, but we recommend using WebVTT whenever possible. We also recommend encoding your caption files in UTF-8 format. Otherwise, captions that contain special characters may not display properly during playback.​

https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/224968828-Captions-and-subtitles

[Stan Jones]

I have not solved this, and have not been trying very hard!

True that PR will not export srt with positioning info. But it is just a text file, and variations on srt can include it. But YouTube won't read it anyway. It is one of their "basic" formats. I don't see a way to post links to their help content. Just look for subtitles.

See this previous discussion:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/closed-captioning-with-cea-608-or-anything-else/m-p/1075...

PR now has an option in srt export to "Include SRT Styling." But it only includes font (e.g. color) and not position. And Youtube includes the tags as regular subtitle text.

I was not successful today using srt (as expected) but also not successful with .vtt and .scc, which I think should work.

Stan

[Andreas Kiel]

YouTube formats

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734698?hl=en

SRT for YouTube must contain only plain text i.e. no style tags.

To use alignment/position, style and color you have to follow awh11's advice.

[ah_photo]

Yup! Exactly this. While Premiere did add the option to Include SRT styling, as Andreas says YouTube does not work with style tags. In fact, I think Premiere used to automatically always include SRT styling tags in export but due to the YouTube issue (and among other services that may not support .SRT styling) Adobe added an option to toggle this. I might be making that up, that said it is a nice option for those who need .SRT.

But alas! YouTube surprisngly does a great job with many other sidecar formats despite promoting .SRT the most. YouTube works with TTML and supports styling and positioning. Huzzah!

In fact, I'm kind of surprised TTML isn't more of a default for YouTube, considering it's support for virtually all timebases and style/position. That said, I'm sure Google has their reasons.

[Stan Jones]

Correction to my post: vtt was working but positioning is not shown in the timing/preview page. Once published, positioning (using the Line: percent method) works.

Stan

[Andreas Kiel]

But you can't export VTT from Premiere 😉