What are "open subtitles"? No information available. (Premiere Pro 14.9 and earlier)

[josha36694150]

I'm new to subtitling and have found plenty of info about creating captions. However, there are now several new features in the drop-down menu not addressed by Adobe or any tutorials. In particular, there are new options for "open subtitles" and "Australian". I've tried playing with "open subtitles" but don't really understand how it works, or how to get them to appear on screen. Seems like it could be good, so looking forward to information.

[Stan Jones · Accepted solution]

Yes, little documentation. I find nothing on the forums, other than the few threads where users were trying to get the display flexibility of Open Captions and used Open Subtitling instead. Open Subtitling is limited in its options much like Closed Captions.

When you export an Open Captions file, you have the choice of .srt and .xml (timed text file). The Open Subtitling adds .stl to those two (EBU N19 Subtitle File, but it is not the .stl  used by Apple DVD Studio Pro). Open Subtitling, like Open Captions, cannot be embedded like closed caption.

You will find, in the end, that you need to decide what your caption/subtitle use will be (DVD, YouTube, vimeo, etc). And there is no guarantee that PR is going to export them in the precise format needed by the target application/player.

[thom_c]

Has anyone had much luck exporting .srt files from Premiere to use in either Vimeo or YouTube ? PP seems to export files with illegal characters that causes (at least) Vimeo to silently fail on import

.. thanks in advance ...

[Stan Jones]

I have not tested enough, but suspect it can be handled by a conversion. See this thread:

Re: premiere 2018 caption sidecar file .srt not accepted by vimeo

Re: premiere 2018 caption sidecar file .srt not accepted by vimeo

Let us know what you find.