How To Create A Caption

The July 2021 release of Premiere Pro (v. 15.4) introduced Speech to Text, which adds automatic video transcription for the Captions workflow. This document explains how to work with captions in Premiere Pro. See Speech to Text to learn how to create transcripts.

If you are using Premiere Pro versions 14.9 or earlier, see the Captions documentation for these releases.

Speech to Text and the Captions workflow in Premiere Pro

Captions and subtitles add value to videos, making them more accessible for more people – and helping to drive viewer engagement.

Premiere Pro provides a comprehensive toolset that lets you create edit, stylize, and export captions and subtitles in all supported formats.

Start by creating a transcript of your video. Edit the transcript in the Text panel and then use Create captions to add your captions to the Premiere Pro timeline. There you can adjust them like any other media using the editing tools. Edit the text in the Text panel or right on-screen in the Program Monitor. Stylize captions using the design tools in the Essential Graphics panel.

When your video is ready, you can export the captions as stylized, burned-in subtitles, a .srt sidecar text file, or embedded in a QuickTime or MXF file.

Where do Captions fit in the workflow?

Usually it's best to add captions when your edit is finished, or close to finished. You can fine-tune and edit along with a caption track.

However, if you delete caption segments, you will need to recreate them manually if you need to restore a part of a clip to your final edit.

To access the Captions workspace: Select Window >Workspaces >Captions from the main menu.

The Captions workspace consists of (A) theText panel where you can edit caption text. You can see the captions displayed on (B) the Program Monitor, and you can edit the appearance of the captions in (C) the Essential Graphics panel.Captions have their own (D) caption track on the timeline where you can edit them.

Add captions to your sequence

You have a few options for creating captions: Automatically transcribe speech to text, import a caption file from a third-party service, or add them manually.

Use a third-party service

If you already have a workflow that uses a third-party transcription service, you can bring in that file.

Import the SRT file into your Premiere Pro project just like any piece of media.
Drag the SRT from the Project panel into your sequence and drop it anywhere in the sequence.

Premiere Pro creates a new caption track, and the captions are placed on the track.

Manually transcribe captions

If you have short sequences, you can choose to manually transcribe sequences.

Check out the keyboard shortcuts at the bottom of this page to find out how you can make manually transcribing captions a breeze.

Working with captions in the timeline

Captions have their own track on the timeline where you can edit them like any other video track. Additionally, you can modify the display of the caption track.

You can stylize your captions using the various styling options (such as font, size, and location) in the Essential Graphics panel.

Create styles for your captions

CreateTrack Styles for consistent styling across the entire captions track. A style saves all the settings made in the Essential Graphics panels, including font, alignment, color and more. Setting a Track Style to one caption applies it to all captions on the track. You can have different styles for different tracks.

After you finish creating and editing your captions, you can export the sequence containing the captions through Premiere Pro or Adobe Media Encoder using the Export Settings dialog box.

You can export your sequence with captions using one of the following options:

Burned in,
Sidecar file, or
Embedded (only supported for captions tracks set to a closed caption standard)

For XML files, besides viewing the captions in the Captions panel, the captions are also viewable from a text editor.

Premiere Pro supports embedding into and decoding from the following file formats:

MOV
DNxHD MXF Op1a
MXF Op1a

Download this sample project and try experimenting with our new captions workflow!