Mastering Captions: Essential Tips for Filmmakers Using Adobe Premiere Pro (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Captions have become a necessity. Using captions on online video sharing platforms like YouTube can help you grow your audience and get more subscribers. If you're a filmmaker and you want to distribute your films on platforms like Amazon Video Direct, then captions are a must. It is a requirement to have captions in the localized language for distribution. So having the right format for your captions is essential. Your film can be rejected for not meeting the closed caption requirements. Take a scene like this. You have doors slamming, background sounds, dialogue, fireballs, and more. How and where do you start? The first step is locking down your edit. In this series, we're going to use Adobe Premiere Pro. Make sure all your audio and video edits are finalized and synced. Once you've locked down your scene or film, export the project into a shareable video. Go to the File menu, Export, and select Media. For this example, in the Export Settings window, I'm going to choose the format as H.264. And since I'm exporting for captioning purposes, I'm choosing Match Source Medium Bitrate in the presets to keep the file size small for faster uploading. Rev is a great platform to get your caption files. With a 24-hour turnaround time, you get synced caption files that are ready to go. You can further customize the look of your captions or choose to burn your captions into your video by importing the caption file back into Premiere Pro. To get captions for your project, go to Rev.com and select the Captioning service. You can either upload your video, share a Dropbox link, or a YouTube link, and select your order type and press Submit. Once the video is captioned, a link to the Rev Caption Editor is sent to you. Here you can edit, add, merge, delete, and move your captions. Any changes you make in the Rev Caption Editor will be automatically saved. Now that you have your captions, you can download the caption file by pressing the Download button in the top right corner. Rev offers a variety of caption formats. SubRip, Facebook Ready SubRip, Sonarist, WebVTT, Transcript, MacCaption, QuickTime TimeText, Cheetah, Avid DS Subtitle Files, Avid DVD Subtitle Files. Select a caption format that best fits your needs, or you can select multiple formats. Then press Download. For this example, we're going to use the .srt or SubRip format. Once you have downloaded the caption file, it's ready to go. You can upload the captions to sites like YouTube, and it will be synced and play perfectly. Now if you want to change the appearance and position of your caption files, or if you want to burn your caption files into your video, then you must import your caption file back into Premiere Pro. Adobe Premiere Pro supports the following caption formats. Sonarist Closed Captions, MacCaption VANC Files, SMPTE TimeText, EBU-N19 Subtitles, and SubRip Subtitle Format. In the next video, we're going to talk in detail about importing your caption files back into Premiere Pro.