Mastering Captions in Premiere Pro CC 2021: A Comprehensive Guide
Learn how to create, style, and export captions in Premiere Pro CC 2021. Make your content accessible with easy-to-follow steps and tips for efficiency.
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CAPTIONS and SUBTITLES in Premiere Pro CC 2021 (everything you need to know)
Added on 09/30/2024
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Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. For today's video, we're talking captions. The brand new text panel in Premiere Pro CC 2021 makes it incredibly easy for you to create captions and subtitles and make your content more accessible to everyone anywhere in the world. Let's take a look. So the first thing you're going to notice when you launch Premiere Pro is that we have a new workspace for this new captions workflow. If we go up to the Window menu under Workspaces, you'll see that you can now choose Captions. When you do that, it's going to automatically bring all the panels into view that you need, primarily the Essential Graphics panel for stylizing your captions, as well as the new Text panel, which is where you'll create your captions. You can import SRT files and do lots more there as well. So we're going to start by creating captions from scratch. Now, you can begin directly inside of the Text panel, but I want to show you one cool tip before we even get started. Let's take a look at some of the new keyboard shortcuts. On the Mac, we're going to go up to the Premiere Pro menu under Keyboard Shortcuts. On Windows, you'll find this under the Edit menu. And here inside the Keyboard Shortcut Editor, I'm simply going to type Caption. Caption, no, S. And then down below, you'll see that we have several new options here that you can assign keyboard shortcuts to. Now, there's two that I want you to keep in mind. You're going to use these a lot. Adding Captions Track, that is Option Command A on the Mac. That would be Option Control A on the PC. And Add New Caption Segment at Playhead. This one is probably the most useful, and you'll see how we begin using this one. And then you have additional features that you can manually assign keyboard shortcuts to. So, with that in mind, let's go ahead and wind the Playhead back to the beginning, and let's just start from scratch. So, I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut. Remember that I can also click on the button right here, Create New Captions Track, from within the Text panel. But instead, I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut, Option Command A. You'll see that it brings up a little dialog here that says New Caption Track. Now, when you go into Format, there's all sorts of cool options in here. Most of these are actually broadcast-related options. For most things that you're going to do, and if you're going to be producing content that you'll be delivering to, say, YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else, you're probably going to want to use the default, which is Subtitle. So, let's go ahead and choose Subtitle. All right. Under Style, we don't have any just yet. We'll come back to that later and click OK. And when I do that, now you have this blank canvas inside of the Text panel. We need to create a new caption segment. So, let's click on that. It creates the new caption, and let's play back and hear what the first things are that I say. Hi, it's Jason Levine from Adobe. Hi, it's Jason Levine from Adobe. So, let's go ahead and wind this back, and I'm simply going to double-click inside of the Text panel and begin typing. Hi, it's Jason Levine from Adobe. Just like that. Okay? Let's continue to play. Hi, it's Jason Levine from Adobe. Here's what you missed. So, let's take it back to the beginning where I say, here's what you missed. Right about here. I'm going to use that keyboard shortcut, Option-Command-C, to create a new caption segment. Let's continue the playback. Here's what you missed this week on Adobe Live. And now we'll type in the caption here. Hit Play. Hi, it's Jason Levine from Adobe. Here's what you missed this week on Adobe Live. It's that simple. So, of course, we can go through all of these and begin adding all the different caption segments wherever we want. I want to point out again that moving things around is as easy as clicking and dragging. Adjusting the duration or where the captions should begin is as easy as just clicking and dragging. Just like editing video, this functions exactly the same way. But what really gets cool is when we can stylize these captions. And this is truly the power of the Text panel and the Essential Graphics panel with this new workflow. I'm going to select one of these caption blocks and you'll see that it's going to go into the Edit mode up here in Essential Graphics. It shows us what the text is. And we effectively now are going to create a new style that we can save and use elsewhere. So I'm not crazy about this Minion Pro. Let's go ahead and choose a different font. I happen to really like Avenir. We can change the size. We can change the style. We can change the justification. You'll also notice that we have these cool Align and Transform options here which are going to allow us to move those captions freely anywhere on screen wherever we want them. You can make these changes globally or you can do them on individual caption blocks. Then we have the Appearance panel where we can adjust things like fill, stroke, shadow, even adding a background box if we want to add a little box around the captions. You typically see this in broadcast, right? So maybe we'll start with a bottom center with this fill, Avenir Light. And let's go ahead and save this as a track style. So I'm going to create a new style up under Track Styles and we'll call this Avenir Light White Center. Alright? Just like that. And now that becomes a track style meaning that this will apply to all of the caption segments in that caption's track. So if I wind back, you can see that it's already been applied to that first caption as well. Now, what if we wanted to do a modification of this? Maybe a version with yellow? Maybe with a bounding box? We can do that as well. So once again, let's choose this first segment. It can be just a single segment. It doesn't matter which one. We can maybe change the weight as well. Maybe even a little bit thicker. What does medium look like? Okay, medium. And then we're going to change the fill. And let's maybe use that kind of standard yellow that you're seeing more and more these days. Alright? Something like that. And if we want to add a background box, we can do that here as well. We can adjust the size of that box. We can adjust the opacity of the box. And we can, of course, adjust the color. So once again, I can go up to our Track Style, Create Style. Okay. And now, again, it has applied that style to all of the captions on the track. Now, when you create track styles, this allows you to export those styles to be reused in other Premiere projects. Track styles are project items. They're saved with the Premiere Pro project. If we want to export or import these to be shared in other projects, it's as simple as going into our Project panel. In this case, I'm going to multi-select those two styles right there, right-click, and I'm going to choose Export Text Styles. Let's go ahead and do just that. And I'll call this My New Styles. And click Save. So now when I start a new project, I already have some predefined track styles that can be applied. Perhaps I like the look of these and I want to use them for all of my videos. I can do that real easily. You can also save as many styles you want in a single caption style file. So in this case, we only have two. We could have 20. We could have 40, all contained in that singular style file. So here we have the finalized captions for this video. And you can see that I'm applying the Avenir light white center track style to everything. So let's just take a quick look at this. Hi, it's Jason Levine from Adobe. Here's what you missed this week on Adobe Live. Today we're going to be talking about how Dynamic Link works with After Effects and Premiere Pro. We're going to take this particular shot, add some text to it. I want to create those animations over in After Effects. Okay? Now, if I were to start from scratch, let's imagine we were going to start a completely new project. Let me show you how you can import those style files. Let's start a new project. And I'm just going to import those style files right away. My New Styles, here's the one that we just created. Click Import. If we notice down in the project panel, it brought in the two styles that we created. And if I began bringing my video in, let's go ahead and import a video as well. Let's go ahead and create a new captions track. Subtitle. But now under Style, because I've already imported that style file, you'll see that we have the option to immediately use the styles that we created. And immediately when I create a new caption segment, you can see that the styling is automatically applied. So, so cool and so easy to do. This also makes it really easy to share those style files with other editors. Now, you've got a lot of cool options inside the text panel. So, let's talk about some of the buttons that you have up here. First of all, you have a search field. So, this is going to allow you to quickly search on any text that you typed in your captions. Perhaps you typed After Effects as one word, but it really should be two words. Or you had something misspelled routinely. Maybe you received an SRT from someone, from a third-party company, and they misspelled your name or something else. Well, this makes it really easy to find those terms and then globally make those changes. So, if I searched on something like After Effects, what you'll see inside the panel here is that it's automatically now going to highlight every instance where After Effects exists. And I can click on the down arrow here to show me the next instance and the next instance. We also have previous and previous. But then we have this super cool replace function here. So, if I click on replace, I can choose to replace it with, let's say we want After Effects to be one word. Go ahead and replace all. And just like that, it will do it for you automatically. So, again, if we were to go back into our search, let's search for After Effects. Now you can see every instance where that exists, it's together. All right? And, of course, we can undo that change simply by doing Command Z, Control Z. Now, we also have the ability to split a caption segment or merge caption segments. Now, splitting the segment is exactly what you'd imagine. If you have a segment, say, that's a little too long, you can use this button here to split the segment. And what it will do, if you take a look inside the text panel, it will automatically create a new segment for you, duplicate the text inside of it, but maintain the proper time code. We also have a merge segment feature. So let's say I wanted to merge this and this together, these two segments. I can go ahead and just zoom in a little bit here. I'm going to select these two segments, and I'm simply going to choose Merge Segments. And when I do that, it will automatically merge the actual caption segment block on screen, as well as merge the text into a single caption segment. So those are some of the cool options that you have for merging, splitting, searching, and replacing inside of the text panel. Let's say that you're going to translate this in multiple languages. Well, it's as simple as just creating multiple captions track. Only one will be displayed on screen at a time, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't inhibit you in any way. You'll notice that you have this brand new discrete captions track down in your timeline. So I'm simply going to use the keyboard shortcut again, Option Command A, to create a new caption track. I'll choose Subtitle again. I can also choose the style. Let's continue with that Avenir Light White Center. Click OK. And now you'll see that we have a new subtitle track, which can also be named. So again, I could call this one English. And maybe this one here will be Spanish. And we can begin creating new captions there. Also, while you have the captions displayed there, you also have this Caption Track Option button. So we can go ahead and choose to Hide All Captions Tracks, Show All Captions Tracks, or Show Active Caption Track Only. So it will only show the active track in question, or we can hide all of them just like that. It's still there. It still will show on screen. You're just not seeing the track header itself inside your sequence. I'm going to go ahead and turn this back on to Show All Captions Tracks, and let's keep on moving. Let me show you now how you can take the captions that you create to create that SubRip subtitle file that you would use to upload to somewhere like YouTube to ensure that you have perfect captions on your video. So from inside the text panel, you'll see that you have this little ellipsis icon here. If I click on this, we have the option now to export to an SRT file. Go ahead and click on that. Choose what you want to call it. We'll call this My Video. Click Save. So now we have a file that we can use to upload directly to YouTube. However, you can also re-import that SRT back into Premiere Pro. So here's our original video again. Let's say that I just wanted to test out and see how that SRT looks. I'm simply going to click Import Captions from File, myvideo.srt, the one we just created. Click Import. It imports the file. Our format's going to be Subtitle. Now, in terms of start point, we can choose Source Timecode, Playhead Position, or Timeline Start. In this case, we're just going to use Playhead Position, but any one of these can apply. Go ahead and click OK. And when I do that, you'll see that our captions have now been applied. And again, if I wanted to add that styling to it, I could apply that as well. Now, what's awesome is you'll see along the left-hand side, we have the entire transcript, which is fully editable and time-coded here, which makes this really super easy. So now let's talk about how we actually export the video and the options that you have for exporting, whether you embed those captions or create that SRT file or a sidecar file externally. We're going to select this sequence and let's do File, Export Media. And we're going to export this as an H.264 because I plan on delivering this to YouTube. I'll go ahead and choose my 1080p YouTube preset. And then let's go over to the Captions tab down here where you'll see that you have a couple of different options. So the default is to burn captions into the video. Now, if you're going to YouTube, the nice thing is you can create that sidecar because you can upload them separately. You don't need to burn them in. Remember, YouTube will also automatically attempt to caption your videos. So it depends on what you want to do. The default is to burn the captions in. Instead, you can choose to create a sidecar file. And when you do that, you'll see that you have two options here, EBU N19 subtitle file or the one that most people will probably choose if you're not doing broadcast, SubRip subtitle file, which is the SRT. So again, you can do STL or SRT. You even have the ability here to include SRT styling. So it'll tell you, you can store caption styling directly inside the SRT file. So once you have all of that selected, I'm going to go ahead and give it a name. Tell it where we want it to go. Call this Master Class Promo. Click Save. And I'm going to go ahead and click Export. Let's go ahead and navigate to the desktop where you can see that we have our Master Class Promo MP4 as well as the Master Class Promo SRT. So this is that sidecar file. It's a standard SRT that it generated so we can upload this separately independently. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please be sure to like and subscribe and click that notification bell to be notified of new videos each week. We'll see you next time.

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