All about CAPTIONS and SUBTITLES in PREMIERE PRO

[Music] Hello creative filmmakers, thanks for watching Orange83. Today I'm going to show you how to make delicious sushi. [Music] [Vinyl scratch] Ha, ha, don't worry, you clicked at the right video. We're going to talk about captions and subtitles. In this video we'll go over the following topics: First, I will explain the difference between subtitles and captions. Next, I'll show you how to add captions in your video inside Premiere Pro. I'm using Premiere Pro 2018 for this tutorial. Most of the things shown in this video also apply to Premiere Pro CC 2017. Older versions like CS6 do not have this functionality, So, if you need it, then it's time to upgrade. In this video I'll also briefly explain the different types of captions that you can choose from. And lastly, I will also show you how to export your video, including captions or subtitles. In case you want to fast-forward to one of the topics, then you can find the timestamps for them in the video description. Before we start I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of this video, Envato Elements. If you need professional assets for your video editing projects, you should definitely check out Envato Elements. They offer a huge library with high value assets, like stock video and photo, video templates, fonts, graphics and so on.

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50 a month. I honestly think that this is a great deal, so, go check them out, links in the video description. Ok, now first I will quickly tell you about the difference between subtitles and captions. I won't go in too much detail but the terms captions and subtitles are used and interpreted differently worldwide. Maybe when you watched YouTube or Netflix you have pressed this button and you've seen the options between English subtitles and English closed captions. The captions are meant for users who are not able to hear the audio. That's why captions also describe sounds and music. And subtitles are mostly used to translate spoken words and other signs into another language. On digital video and online streaming services these terms are often used interchangeably. But captions seems to be the more popular term.

Inside Premiere you will mainly find the term captions, So, that is what we're going to use for the rest of this video

Now, let's head over to Premiere and I'll show you how to add captions to your video. I've already opened my project, and inside the sequence we've got some footage combined with a voiceover audio track. Let's have a quick playback and listen to it. "...lay about two ounces of the filling, either a single ingredient or a combination, along the center of the rice." Okay, you get the point. To add captions we need to go to the Project Panel then click the New Item icon here at the bottom and then select Captions. Again, if you don't see this option, your version of Premiere Pro is too old. You first need to upgrade. Next, we can choose from a couple of caption standards. In Premiere Pro 2018 you've got these options to choose from: Again, I won't go in too much detail, but before we proceed you need to understand the difference between the options. The options to choose from are mainly based on broadcast standards worldwide. 608 and 708 are both caption standards in the United States and Canada. 608 is the older analog version, the 708 standard is for digital television. Teletext is the European equivalent for 608 and 708, and Australian speaks for itself. These four standards are so-called closed captions, which means that they can be enabled or disabled as long as the decoder or media player supports it. Unlike open captions, which are always visible and the caption data is rendered into the video. So, to be clear, with open captions the text is part of the video.

It does not exist separately from the video

Closed captions are more limited in size, position, font and colors all based on broadcast standards. Open captions have a lot more visual options but they cannot be turned off.

Now I will show you both open and closed captions so you can see the difference

Now, let's start with the 708 captions. I will use the default settings for stream and frame rate and then click OK. This has now created a new captions item here in the Project Panel. You can drag this over to the timeline, right above your footage. After that, we can select the captions layer on the timeline, and then stretch it out until you have the desired duration. And then we can move over to the Captions Panel. If you don't have this panel enabled, you can go to the Window menu and then select Captions here. And to make the closed captions visible, we also need to enable them in the Preview monitor. To do this, you need to go to the wrench icon here on the bottom of the screen, then go to Closed Captions Display and then select Enable. If you still can't see the captions, you need to go to the settings and there you need to select the right standard and the right stream. And now you can see the captions displayed here in the Preview monitor. Now let's adjust them in the Captions Panel. Like I mentioned with closed captions, you cannot change that much to the visuals of the captions, but still we've got a few options here. For example, you've got some alignment and positioning options. If you click on one of the dots in this grid you can change the position of the captions. And we've also got a few basic animation options. There is no option to change fonts, but you can italicize or underline the text if you want. Or you could add a music note. This could for example be used to indicate a sound effect or music in your video. If you click on this icon here you can change the color of the background. Let's pick a yellow color for now and we can also change the color of the text, and let's put this at the black color. And that's all we can change to the visuals with 708 captions. Now let's add the actual text and also change the timing. Here on the timeline you can see the duration for each caption line. You can change the duration by simply left clicking on the end and then drag it to left or right. Now we've only got one line, let's add a few more.

You can do this by clicking on this + icon, this will create a new caption line

And then on the timeline you can rearrange or change timing of each individual caption line. You can also change timing up to milliseconds here inside the Captions Panel. All the caption lines are positioned, so it's time to add some text. I've already prepared them inside a notepad document, so I will copy and paste them. Although we made the captions quite ugly with this yellow color, you can see that they work if I scrub to the timeline. Okay, now how to export them.

First you need to go to the Export menu and then select Media

In there you can find a captions tab where you can select three options. The first one is not to export captions. The second one is to create a separate Sidecar File. And for this option you also need to select the file format standard that you need. The third one is to include the captions inside the video, which basically is the same as open captions. And in case you only want to export your captions, you need to go to the Export menu and then select Captions.

As you can see here it's grayed out, and that is simply because we need to select it first in the Project Panel and then we can click on Export and then select Captions

Then select the needed file format, click OK, then select the directory for the export and click Save. You have now seen the closed captions and how to export them, so, now let's have a quick look at open captions. Also here, you need to go to the New Item icon, select Captions and then select Open Captions. In here you need to specify the resolution and frame rate settings for your captions. And that's because these captions will be included or burned into the video. The rest of the steps will be quite similar to the closed captions.

The only difference is that you've got a lot more options for visual styling

As you can see here in the Captions Panel, you can change things like the font, the font weight, the font size, and even add an outline or stroke or edge effect to the text. And the rest is all identical to the steps that I've shown you for closed captions. The only other difference that you will find is during the export. Inside the Captions tab you will only have the option to burn the captions into the video. Before we end the video, a quick bonus tip.

If you want to produce and export captions for YouTube purposes, I would recommend to use 608 or Teletext

And then exporting it to an srt file seems to be the most common solution. Lately, I've seen some strange issues with 708 closed captions. Things like being unable to change the background color or the position of the text. I'm sure that Adobe will fix this in future updates, But for now this seems to be the best option. And that concludes this video on captions and subtitles inside Premiere Pro.

I hope you enjoyed it and learned some new stuff today

But before I end this video I want to ask you a favor. YouTube also has a captions or subtitles function. And there's an option to contribute to a video by submitting your own translation or subtitles to a video. So, that is exactly what I wanted to ask you to do. To translate this video into your own language. That way we can have this video with the topic, captions and subtitles in a lot of languages. That would be super awesome! You will find the steps to do this inside the video description. And that's it for this video. Don't forget to subscribe if you don't want to miss any of my future content. Thanks again for watching and see you next time on Orange83. [Music]

Tags: youtube live closed captioning