Captioning Workflow Using Premiere Pro 2022
- Amaya Guevara Beristain
- Mar 20, 2022
- 13 min read
In this blog post, I will be sharing with you the different types of captioning there are, and how I use my workflow to create captions in Premiere Pro 2022. Premiere’s newest captioning updates make the whole process so much easier, so if you haven’t updated it yet; I will recommend for you do it.
Captioning has been one of my favorite parts of video editing. I know it might be a bit tedious to some. But once you nail down the workflow, the entire process will be so much easier.
Whether it is adding closed captioning o your YouTube video, to posting one on LinkedIn, there are different steps you should take into consideration. I am going to walk you down the basics first. Knowing what different types of captions there are will help you understand the deliverables you will need to create for each of your videos.
What are the different types of captions you have for videos?
There are 3 main types of captions:
Subtitles
Open Captions
Closed Captions
What is the difference between subtitles and captions
Sometimes captions and subtitles might be used interchangeably. I am guilty of doing that before learning the difference between them. However, they are not the same….
Subtitles: is used when you are translating the video into another language.
Captions: is when you are using the same language as on the video.
Open captions vs closed captions?
Withing the captioning world we have open captions and closed captions. These are captions that have different deliverables…
Closed captions: Can be turned on and off by the viewer.
Open Captions: CAN NOT be turned on and off because they are embedded into the video.
How does this look like in terms of deliverables? Well, a closed captioned video will have an export of SRT file because you want the option of turning it on and off. This are the type of captions you will find on YouTube or Vimeo.
Whereas with open captions, they are in embedded on the video so you can’t turn it on and off. With these kinds of videos, you are exporting the captions as ‘burn-in’ to the video. But we will get more into that later on our workflow breakdown.
Open Captions tend to be used mostly used on social media. You want the audience to have the opportunity to watch the video without audio. This practice is growing more and more in the field of social media content creation. Not only does it make your video accessible to a greater audience, but if a person is looking at it on the train or in a place where they can’t play the audio; the captions allows them to view the content.
Why is captioning important? Why should your videos include captions?
There are a lot of advantages to including captions into your videos. Not only does it make your video accessible for people who are deaf or hard hearing. But it also helps other people’s whose language might different from what is being viewed in. Especially if there is strong accents involved.
For example, my family has always include subtitles in English because it helps them understand the film. Despite me ability to write and understand English, sometimes you do need subtitles. Especially if the character is hard to understand: e.g. Thomas Wake’s character in The Lighthouse.
People who are in environments where they can’t turn on their audio, the train, the office, etc. All of them watch these videos with captions.
It also make your videos easier to understand for everyone. Whether you are bilingual like myself, or a native English speaker, having the captions can be extremely helpful. Especially if the audio in your video isn’t the best.
Sometimes, microphones can glitch. Or like we have seen working remotely, our video may lag because of our internet connection. Having captions on videos facilitates the whole process. Of course, captioners can’t perform miracles. So please be mindful of this.
A step-by-step guide to captioning in Premiere Pro 2022: Amaya’s Workflow
There are 3 main steps I take every time I am captioning a project:
Create a transcript of the video
Add captions on Adobe Premiere Pro 2022
Export video on selected deliverables: SRT or Burned-In Captions.
Over three years ago, I learned how to create captions as a video editor. When I started, Premiere didn’t had the captioning options it has now. Which meant that you needed to create captions, line per line, and change it.
With the most recent Premiere Adobe 2022, you have 3 options with captioning:
Manually add captions yourself
Import SRT files into the project.
Let Adobe Premiere auto-transcribe your video.
Step 1: Creating your audio transcript
Autotrancription is a great tool, but it wouldn’t necessary be accurate. Which is one of the reasons I will recommend manual transcription, which is the process that I use.
What is the difference between auto transcription and manual transcription?
Auto-transcription services uses a software that reads the audio of the footage and makes the transcript for you.
Manual transcript is when a person hears the footage, and manually types down what is being said. This tend to be more accurate.
You can always do a combination of both as well.
For my workflow, I write the transcript myself. After finalizing the video, I spend some time listening to the audio and writing down what is being said on a Word document. You can use both Microsoft Word or Google Doc for this.
There a couple of benefits from using a manually written transcript. The first is that you can see any spelling mistakes, and also catch any titles of projects that might be referenced by the speakers. As a reference, if you hear a book, or a movie being said, you might want to turn those titles into italics which signals the viewer that it a separate piece of content.
The second, is that you then can just copy and paste each line into you captions later when you begin adding them into Premiere. This is the most important part of the process, because it ensures that what is being writing doesn’t have the same mistakes as auto-correct. It will also make your captioning process easier and faster.
Just remember, that process you will be working right now will help you on the long term. Effort you do at the very beginning will work-out in the long term.
If you don’t want to do the transcript, you can always ask someone else to do it. There are freelancers like myself who will do it for a fixed price. Of course, you should always check if the audio is clear for the captioners to do their amazing work.
Adding Captions on Premiere Pro 2022
Open your project file on Adobe Premiere 2022. You will see that your window might open on either ‘assembly’ or ‘editing’ window. Premiere has different windows you can change to depending on what you are working on. These can be found on the top header of the Premiere window.
Make sure you switch to the ‘Captions and Graphics’ window. You might see that there is different layout than in the other windows. On the left side of the screen you will see the caption window, and below the project window.
Project window: This is where you will find all the bins (aka folders), sequences, and footage from your whole project folder.
Caption window: This is where you will be writing down the captions.
The captions window has 3 options that you can choose from:
Transcribe sequence
Create new caption track
Import captions from file
For this workflow, you will select ‘create new caption track’. We are doing this because since we already have a transcript, we can manually put the captions. Since we did the work beforehand, we will only have to copy and paste from the transcript into the video.
The ‘new caption track’ window will pop up. You will make sure that ‘subtitle’ is chosen and that the style is ‘none’.
Now, go to the top corner of your captions window and click the + button. This option is ‘add new segment’. You will want to write a new segment, every time you are moving into the following lines.
Let’s say I have something that says something like:
If you are living in New York, there a couple of things you should keep in mind. The public transport is amazing and will get you almost everywhere, so always have a metro card at hand.
As you will see, this is too long to put it all in one caption segment. So what we will do is divide it up into different segments so that the audience can see as they are being said. The trick with good caption is always to keep in mind its pace and speed. We don’t want to have a caption that goes too fast, or one that doesn’t match the speakers because it’s too slow.
With the example I gave above, we will divide it into the following segments:
S E G M E N T 1 :
If you are living in New York,
there are a couple of things
S E G M E N T 2 :
you should keep in mind.
S E G M E N T 3 :
The public transport is amazing.
Once you create the first segment, an orange track will appear at the top of the sequence. You might not see it at first, so remember to zoom in into your sequence so you will see it. The captions segments work similar to the footage track on Premiere. You can extend it or move it by dragging it across you sequence.
Something to keep in mind is that every time you create a new segment, a new segment will follow right after. If your first segment, needs to be shorter than the default length, you can also crop it by hovering your mouse at the edge, and slide it to the left like you would with a footage.
The best Premiere Pro 2022 update is the following: You can create a new segment right where your cursor is.
Let’s say we finish a segment at 00:05 on the sequence. Then there are a couple of seconds of silence before the speakers starts talking again. One you finish that last segment, you move your cursor to the frame where he starts speaking again, and then go to the + icon and create a new segment.
Otherwise, Premiere, will automatically create a new segment right after the last segment ended.
You will always want to create caption segments that have max of 2 lines.
Now that I have created the track, I will go ahead and style my caption!
Styling captions on Premiere Pro 2022
Once you create a caption segment, Premiere will add its own default location and style.
Premiere Pro allows you change the font, background, text in many ways. All of this can be edited on the ‘essential graphics’ window on the right hand side of the screen.
Another of the perks from Premiere Pro’s captions update is that now you can create a ‘track style’. The track style is a caption preset you can save so that all the captions of your sequence is stylized the same.
What this means is that if you were to create one segment, and then a following one, you will see that they might differ in location and font. The Track Style option saves you the time to manually change it all. Once you save it and implement it into the second segment or first segment you will see that it is done in all of the caption segments you have create.
But you should watch out for one key thing: if you edit one caption segment’s style after saving the present, it will not show on the other ones.
You should always save the track style once are happy with it. You can always save another version of the track style with different design if you want to change into different ones.
Amaya’s Workflow for stylizing captions….
1. Change the location of the captions
Go to Essential Graphics window on the right side of the screen.
Now Premiere tends to put the caption line a bit lower than what I like as a default. I like to live some room between the bottom of the screen and the caption lines so it is directly on the bottom third of the entire screen. So what I do is move it a bit upwards so it’s better placed.
We can change the location of the captions by going into ‘align and transform’ section on the ‘essential graphics window’. Here you will see that there are a couple of option:
Vertical position
Horizontal position
You can see the name of the tool by hovering over it with your mouse.
Since I am moving the caption upwards, I will be choosing ‘vertical option’. I can change the position by clicking on it, and dragging left or right to its assigned position.
2. Change the font of the captions
On the Essential Graphics window you can also change the font, its color and size. There a couple of fonts that are standard in captioning:
Helvetica
Arial
Verdana
Tahoma
If you are creating a video that has an stylized caption font. Then you can select that font. If you don’t, you can never go wrong by usual the common captioning fonts mentioned above.
To add the fonts, you will go ‘text’ and click on the font. Once you click, you can delete the font, and type the one that you want to replace the default one with.
As you type the font, you will see the fonts come up.
Then once you have selected a font, you can change it into the font style, or the alignment. (E.g left side, center, right side). In my case, I always like going to Helvetica for my captions.
Sometimes you might want to add a background to your captions as well. The backgrounds can make your captions more readable. For example, as the example video for this tutorial, I am using an episode of my Time Capsule Stories tv show. Since my background is blue, I decided to add a background into the captions to make it readable.
To add a background on your captions, you will go to the ‘essential graphics’ window. Down to ‘appearance’ section, and check the check box next to the option of backgrounds. This will create a background.
Now we will be stylizing the background. I will first remove the ‘shadow’ that comes with Premiere’s default caption since there is no need for it.
Then I will increase the size of the background so it goes around all of the text. I want to leave some space between the edges of the background and the text because that makes it clearer.
The default opacity of the background is 75%, but you can always change it depending on your video.
Once you are happy with your captions’ style, you will go to ‘Tract Style’ on the ‘essential graphics’ window.
Then you will select ‘create style’. Then you will name your style.
Once you create the style, you will see that all the other captions you did before will automatically changed to the new style you created.
You will also find your caption style present on your project window.
One of the key perks of creating the style, not only is a consistent style but a consistent location of your captions. If you have caption segments were you have two lines over each other, then the caption style will keep it align with the rest.
Exporting captions from Adobe Premiere Pro 2022
There are two exporting options you can do:
Burn captions into video
SRT files
The export option you will choose will depend on where you will be publishing your video. Social media videos tend to have the captions burned into them. Whereas, some websites like YouTube and Vimeo give you the option to upload an SRT file with the video.
If we look back at the 2 types of captions we have for videos, you will see why knowing the difference is vital for this process:
Open Captions cannot be turned on and off by the viewer. This means they are burn into the video.
Closed Captions can be turned on and off by the viewer. This means that they are exported with an SRT file that gives the option to the viewer to them on and off with the ‘CC’ icon you see on some websites.
How to export caption on Adobe Premiere Pro 2022
To export the captions, you will make sure your sequence is selected. Then go to the top left hand side of your screen and select ‘File’ from the Menu. Then go down to ‘Export’ and then select ‘Media’.
The ‘Export Settings’ Window will pop up.
Now once in this window, you will make sure all the other details are set correctly. Then you will go down to the ‘captions’ section. Premiere’s export setting window’s will automatically show you the video section, you will need to the select ‘captions’
Burn-in captions export
By default, Premiere will give you the option of ‘burn captions into video’. You will choose this option for videos that are going to social media like Instagram, Facebook, etc.
If you want to create the open captions, you can ahead and just leave like that and select ‘queue’ which will create your export. The export will be a video with your captions embedded into it.
SRT File captions export
To export SRT files, you will go into the captions section on ‘export settings’ window. Then you will go to ‘export option’ under captions, and select ‘create side card file’.
Once you select it, you will see that the file format under export option has changed to ‘SubRip Subtitle Format’ which means SRT File.
Then you will select ‘Queue’ to export the SRT file with your video.
After the export, you will see that you have two files. One is the video, and then an SRT file. The good thing is that the SRT file will have the same name as your video.
Captions Example: Time Capsule Stories: Episode 3 – Taylor Swift
If you want to see an example of my finalized version, you can check out Time Capsule Stories - Episode 3: Taylor Swift
In this example above, I decided to burn in captions into my video since it was going into my social media channels.
If your video is going to YouTube or Vimeo, you might consider exporting an SRT file.
Captioning tips for Premiere Pro Users
TIP 1: Whenever in doubt, look out for examples
If you aren’t unsure about the style or length of the caption segments, you can always refer back to your favorite shows or films. This will help you get comfortable when knowing when the caption lines are too long or go too fast.
TIP 2: Always keep a document with your design info
Even though Premiere gives you the option of saving a caption style, you should ALWAYS have a set of notes with the design details of your videos. Whether it is on your notebook, computer, or screenshots, you should always have a place where you can go back as a reference.
Things you can note down for the captions:
Font size
Background opacity
Shadow opacity (if using shadow)
Are you using a stroke for your captions?
Other key things you should have written down are:
Name of fonts - the ones you used most on your designs
Color Codes - are codes for a designated color. Each color has its own code, and if you are working with a certain palette, you should have those codes noted down. If you have to add them into your projects, you can just copy and paste the code into color picker and will automatically lead you to that color. It will help you stay consistent.
TIP 3: Useful shortcuts
Command + C : copy
Command + V : paste
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