Treating Closed Captions as a Multi-Cam Layer

[Gordon James McDowell]

Have imported identical captions as Open Captions (SRT) and Closed Captions (STL).

This is so I can both burn them in, and generate closed-captioning data as well.

( If that is crazy, please let me know. I'm not aware of how people typically use captions. )

So I have a (French) Sync sequence, containing  following tracks...

Audio 1 - Audio from MP4

Video 1 - Video from MP4

Video 2  - Closed Captions via STL

Video 3 - Open Captions via SRT

...the STL and SRT data was output from Subtitle Edit.

And an English-only speaker, I need to have readable captions while I edit. While CC seem to export nicely, they're almost unreadable on-screen (although they export correctly). The OC are perfectly readable.

But I do need BOTH, and control over both while editing. The same way we control audio and video while editing. So this "Sync" sequence has been imported into an "Edit" sequence, and all tracks are multi-cam tracks.

The OC I can control. I can turn them off & on by using tracks as multi-cam, and showing (or not-showing) that track.

CC I can NOT control... if ALL tracks are turned off then CC does not show. If ANY tracks (not just video-track-2) are showing then CC are on-screen.

I don't know if this is a bug or not. Why would it behave this way? Can I make it behave the way I want? Where in "Sync" sequence CC are on V02, and I need to show V02 in "Edit" for CC to appear, since it is V02 in "Sync" where they reside.

And I also imagine this is not possible, but I'd like to pull both CC and OC from a single source file, rather than exporting both SRT and STL from Subtitle Edit.

[Trevor_Asq]

In the testing I’ve done (cc2017.0.2) neither open nor closed seem to work properly.

SRT open captions import as SD size & D1/DV PAR, even when scaled up to frame size the edges are cropped. Updating the text in the captions window did not update the display (although it did update the marker on the caption clip & was correct if I exported the captions).

SCC closed captions were limited to first few characters, and displayed with very wide kerning, although that may have been a fault with the stl generation.

I’ve ended up using PNG files, which are easily manipulated in the timeline & edited (using the PNG editor that comes with Subbits, the subtitle generator I’m using).

As we come close to final cut I’ll export an xml of the PNG layer and use Subbits or AE to regenerate the subtitles. I dont need closed captions, but should be able to generate those too once the film is locked.

[Gordon James McDowell]

I guess when I talk about what IS working for me I should clarify I'm not actually EDITING the captions in PPro... like the CC comes in and I edit a sequence containing it, and export back out... If I need to change a timecode I'll go back to the source and re-export and re-import into PPro. Since I use both OC and CC that's my best way to keep them in sync, instead of trying to update the 2 (identically) in PPro.

This is like the 4th time I've tried to use captions in PPro, and finally forcing myself to figure it out. Other times I just found I couldn't deal with it and instead created the captions after video was edited. Entirely outside of PPro. Regardless what caption assets I already had for the source video clips.

PPro used to have an auto-captioning feature, it could recognize your voice and generate captions. Never used it, but I did notice how they dropped the feature, and I took that to mean Adobe wasn't focused on captioning tools as a feature.