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Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

Create your own captioning in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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All right, to get started let’s bring in a file from a previous course, go to 'Sound', bring in 'Sound 03 - Shotgun', and just, we'll create a sequence from it. What I want you to do is, switch over to here for captions, if you haven't already, and let's use our backspace, down here, backslash, '\' even, so that it fills the screen. So create a new track, and over here, the format. 

Now subtitle is your kind of generic subtitle, like we talked about, and closed captioning are all these other ones, and these will use a different kind of formatting, to kind of make them compliant. So we're going to use just regular old subtitles, mainly because I've never done, I've never been on the other side of creating captions, I get mine sent out, I'll show you some of the ones I've got made, but subtitles is a nice generic one to start with, let's click 'OK'. 

Now basically, yeah, have your 'Timeline' selected, and what you'll, just add a new subtitle. I'm going to listen to this a little bit and type it in, you don't have to watch, I'll speed this up. All right, so my grammar is probably terrible, but you get the idea, you click on it, type it in, and then down here you can-- see this new subtitle track opened up, that's what this CC thing's been grayed out for so long, it's been completely grayed out because we've had no subtitle track. 

Now you can hide them, you can show all of the tracks, or just the ones that are being used. So over here what I'm going to do is I'm going to move it, so I'm going to go to my 'Move' tool, 'V' tool. Your tools have gone, oh, this layout, it's up there. So 'V' is straight to that Move tool, and you just line it up. How long does it need to be? I need to find out, when I stop saying the word, meaning of color, "With the meaning of color." About there, and then zap it in. 

Now you've got the option of making a new one, I'm going to do that again in fast forward mode. So you saw me typing there, got lucky with psychology. Oh, what happened to that, where did he go? Notice that just disappeared, that was weird. Did I hit undo by mistake? 'Redo', come back, that text, yeah, it's there, but it's not there, oh, it's weird, there it is back again. I'll leave this in the course in case it happens to you, it hasn't happened to me before, there you go. I copied and pasted it from over here, and then it reappeared, weird. So you can keep adding, obviously, with the different time codes. You can drag it out or you can type it in. 

One thing you can do though, you can split caption and merge captions. Sometimes you might be just typing it out, a lot more than what you need. So what you can do is you double click it, actually you don't have to double click it, just have it selected, and you can split that caption, and decide that, actually, I'm going to break that bit off there, and this bit here, doesn't need this bit here. You can see, it's kind of break it off into its own caption, and it's to do with the timing, of like when this all appears, I've got a weird return in the top there. The other one is merging captions, you can hold 'Shift' and click a couple of them and squish them back together. 

Now styling them, let's style this, actually, I'm going to undo it, so I've got three, you can select them all, and style them at once using the 'Essential Graphics' panel, 'Edit', or just click one of them. I'm going to do one of them because I want to show you another little trick. Let's click on this first one, pick your font, you know, you might be corporate, you know, you might be, your accessibility plan, might include a font. Let's say we're using Roboto Medium for ours, and yeah, then you go and style it. I'm not going to spend a long time, things that are kind of useful, can you see the little zone for linking them. You can position them in different parts, maybe the first one, is that just me, they're always in the middle. 

Color, Shadow, I'm going to go for, I prefer the background to be black, and I like the background outline to be a bit bigger. The opacity, yeah, opacity is good. So once you've done a bit of planning on this, what you can do - let's change the font size, whoa, too big. What we're going to do is set it as a style. So go up to here, it says 'Track Style', we can 'Create Style'. It's going to use whatever you've got selected over here. So let's call this one, "CCs for Bringyourownlaptop", I click 'OK', and it means, now I can click on, highlight these ones. You'll see that they're actually, the style actually got attached, because we've only got one style, it's gone through and done it for us automatically, but let's say that we've gone and changed it, or working on another document, we can select on it and say, you, my friend are not None, you are "Bringyourownlaptop CC style." 

Now the one thing with these is, that's not permanent, that style there won't be in your next project, but alas, but don't worry, you can-- remember in the earlier video, when we're looking at the Essential Graphics panel, when we made styles, where did they end up, you know it, right there, look, my CC Bringyourownlaptop. So I can do a couple of things. I can copy and paste it, so I can go select it, I'm going 'Command C' on a Mac, 'Ctrl C' on a PC, go to 'New Project', 'Untitled', bad, and I can make, let's add, 'New', 'New Sequence', and in here I can hit 'Paste'. Can you see, there's my CC Style, and I go to 'New Caption Track', and I can either do it afterwards, or before I get started, get started with the subtitles, being the right kind of style, look at that, brilliant. 

With styles though, if you are sharing them with others, you can right click them and go to 'Export Text Styles', so it's an actual file. I know they have long term plans to get them, into the CC Libraries, that might be true already. So check if you can, like export to CC Libraries on your version. 

Last couple of things is - let's go back to this first one here. - is you can search, so you're going to have a lot, mine's only very short, obviously, but you can obviously have a lot. So we're looking for everything that has "theory", you can see, it's highlighted it, you can move forward, back, you can replace it, like say we decide that color is no longer, going to be spelled that way, wrong market, so we're going to go 'Replace with', "color". 'Replace All', nice. 

Say you do get to a point now, and you needed this out of here, it's great because you're going to-- we'll export it in a little bit with our CC's kind of part of it, but let's say we just want to get it out for transcription. You know, like we saw at the beginning there, you can go to this, and say, let's 'Export to text file', so let's do this one, I'll stick mine on my desktop. It's getting messy, actually, click on it. 

So I'm going to do a "Color Theory", a text file, and I'll do an SRT file. If you've never used an SRT file, it's a very common, like interchangeable subtitling format, that's what-- that's how I get all my formatting done. So if I get like the Hindi one done or the English one done, our subtitler, Larry, he'll send it to us in SRT format, and that allows us to import it into the footage afterwards. So he does this in a separate program, he doesn't use Premiere Pro, he uses a proper, like transcribing software. This is a bit cumbersome if you've used one of those other bits of software. It's fine for short things but for long things, there are better programs to do, and create captions, and you can export the SRT file, and that's something you can share with somebody else, to bring in this closed captioning. 

Let's just have a look at them, actually, the SRT file is not readable, it's readable by programs that can read subtitles. So let's look at our Desktop, so I've got that one, "Color Theory", easy, look, just dumped out all the text, which is nice. The SRT file, I have no idea where I put it, it's unopenable, anyway. So we can't open it unless we open it with, say like Premiere Pro, or you can upload it to YouTube, but I'll show you a better way of doing that as well, but there you go, that's your whirlwind start, in captioning, inside of Premiere Pro.