Mastering Captions in Adobe Premiere Pro: A Step-by-Step Guide by Jacksfilms (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey everyone, Jack from Jacksfilms here. Recently, I asked you to recreate famous movie scenes and then send those scenes to me, with and without audio, so that I could try to guess the scene live on stream. Needless to say, it was a smash success. What is this? I really wish I could read lips right now. Is this so Captain Mike? Oh, Captain Mike, Captain Mike. Oh, come on. Apologize. Five, one, six, two, four. Oh my God, I just figured it out. During this process, I realized two very important things. My acting can not get any better. Hurry up and put your name in the goblet of fire. No, sir. And having captions on videos is extremely important. Captions help with giving the audience a better understanding of context and are super important to those viewers who are hard of hearing or watch videos without the volume turned on. Now you might be thinking, Jack, creating captions is such a tedious and time-consuming process, but that's just not true anymore. If you haven't had the pleasure of trying out Adobe Premiere's caption workflow or using its powerful new speech-to-text tool, then today is your lucky day. So buckle up and let's jump into it. Down here on my timeline, I have my Academy Award nominated scene with some captions already done, but the font and style of these captions are very boring. So let's change that. Make sure you're in the captions workspace by clicking Captions at the top of Premiere, then click on one of your subtitles and choose Edit on the right-hand side. Under the Edit tab, you'll see formatting controls like you're used to seeing in pretty much every Adobe program, so there should be no surprises over here, except for maybe this grid of small squares, which allows you to place the caption on different parts of your screen. The rest is standard fare and gives you a ton of customization options. By default, captions won't have a dedicated style to them, so we should make a few different styles to choose from. First, I'll start by making myself a standard caption style, which is Arial font with a white fill and a black background layer turned up to 100% opacity. This style is more or less universal and can be easily read on screen. Once you've got your style dialed in, come up to Track Style and click on where it says None and choose Create Style. Name your style, then it will save that caption style into your project bin. You may have noticed a little up arrow next to Track Style, and if you press that, it will allow you to push that caption style to the rest of the captions on your timeline, making it super easy to uniformly change everything all at once. This is looking pretty good, but let's make a few more caption styles just to be safe. Maybe an art house style with a cool font, a yellow fill, and a drop shadow. Pretty nice, I'll save that to my project. How about Comic Sans with a white fill, black stroke, and red background? Sure, why not? Save that to my project too. You can create and save as many caption styles as you'd like and demo them on your timeline by pushing the style to all captions on the track, but don't go too crazy. You still need your captions to be readable. Now that we've done all this work, we should definitely save these caption styles to our computer so we can import them into other Premiere projects in the future. All you have to do is right-click on the caption style and choose Export Text Styles and save it somewhere on your computer. I recommend making a Text Styles folder on your hard drive to keep everything nice, neat, and in one place. Now, if you open a new or blank Premiere project, you can simply drag and drop those text styles into your project, and if you wanna be really nice, you can send these presets to your editor friends so they can use your caption presets too. Sharing is caring. Go ahead and create as many text styles as you want, and in the next video, we'll create and work with SRT files to make sure our stylish captions can go beyond just our timeline. For now, I wanna thank you for watching this tutorial, giving it a thumbs up, and drop in a comment below letting me know how much you value my expertise and appreciate my smooth, soothing baritone. If you like more content like this, subscribe to Adobe's channel, and if you like more of this, you can find me on YouTube, at Jax Films. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.