Subtitles in videos are quite important, especially if you want them to be more accessible to everyone. If you take a look around social media, you’ll see that it’s rare to find a video without them. They help us both to follow the thread of the video better and to understand it if it’s in another language.
As of today, we have many editing programs to add subtitles, but Adobe Premiere Pro is one of the most comprehensive and versatile available. Below, you will see how you can add subtitles in Premiere by yourself, in an easy and quick way.
How to generate automatic subtitles for a video
There are several ways we can follow in Premiere Pro to easily add subtitles to our videos. The first one is at the very beginning of the process, when we are creating our project.
To start, we open Premiere and select New Project. Next, we write the name it will have, where the project will be located on the computer, and, if we want, choose a predefined template to save time. When you finish, click on Create.
Now, you will choose which resources (whether videos, images, or sounds) will appear in your project. On the left, you will see a quick view of the folders on your computer so you can easily find your resources. Here, select the video you want to have subtitles and direct your view to the right panel. Then, check the Automatic transcription box.
You can choose the video language in Language or check the box for Enable language auto-detection. The latter will cause Premiere to analyze the video to determine which language it is in. Further down, you will also find the option for Speaker labeling, which will make Premiere distinguish who the speakers are and classify them as such. In Transcription preferences, you can select whether the transcription settings apply to just a specific clip or to all the clips you are going to import.
When you finish, select Import. Wait for Premiere to finish analyzing the clips and we can continue. Now, go to Window > Text and you will see a new panel with the transcribed audio appear. If you see any transcription errors, select the pencil symbol, so you can edit the texts.
When you finish and see that the subtitles are correct, go to Captions and click on Create captions from transcript. Next, a series of options will appear where you can choose the format, the style of the subtitles, whether you want them to be one line or two, the duration… Don’t worry if it doesn’t turn out as you had thought, you can change it later. Finish by selecting Create captions.
After creating the subtitles, we can apply new visual styles to them. Go to the timeline, located further down, and start by selecting one of the subtitles. In the Properties panel, you can change the font, color, see if it is centered or not, and much more. Experiment as much as you want to achieve the result you are looking for.
When finished, we will need to apply the style created to the rest of the subtitles in the video. In the Track Style section, select Redefine Style, which is the first button located to the right of the styles.
Now, click on All captions on track to apply the changes to all the subtitles of the clip at once. If you like the style you have created and want to save it for future projects, select the “+” icon located in the upper right corner of the Track Style menu and select Create style. Here you will see two options, Save to Project and Save to Local styles. The first will link it to the project and will create a folder within the Project panel. The second will save the style in a local folder on your computer so you can use it in other videos.
How to create translated subtitles from another language
As we mentioned at the beginning, having subtitles translated into other languages can greatly improve the reach of your videos (at least if you want to focus on social media).
If you have already done the above, return to the Captions panel and select the translation symbol, as we indicated in the image.
Next, choose the original language of the subtitles (although Premiere can detect it automatically) and select which other language it will be translated to. When you finish with the settings, select Translate.
When Premiere finishes analyzing everything, you will see another additional bar above Subtitles on the timeline with the new subtitles already translated for the entire clip.
How to create subtitles manually
To manually add our subtitles, we simply need to go to Window > Text within our project and then go to the Captions tab. Here we need to select whether we want to create subtitles from scratch in Premiere or import texts that we have already written in a document. For the first option, we click on Create new caption track and for the second, Import captions from file.
If you selected Create new caption track, go to the Text panel and click on the + button. This will create the first subtitle, which you will see named as New Caption. Double-click on New Caption or select the pencil icon to edit the subtitle text. In the timeline, you will see it on a separate layer called Subtitle.
If you decide to import the subtitles, you should know that you will not be able to use the most “common” text files. The compatible extensions are as follows:
Sidecar files
- SCC (for television broadcasts)
- MCC
- XML
- STL
- SRT (ideal for YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo)
- DFXMP
XML Files
- W3C TTML (DFXP)
- SMPTE-TT
- EBU-TT
