How to Add Subtitles or Closed Captions to a Video in Premiere Pro CC 2020 Version 15 (New Interface)

Some links in this post are affiliate links, I may earn a commission (at no additional cost to you) if you make a purchase. Read the disclosure for more information.

In this video, I’ll show you how to add subtitles or closed captions to a video in Premiere Pro CC 2021 from version 15 onwards.

Transcript

In this video, I’ll show you how to add subtitles or closed captions to a video in Premiere Pro CC 2021 from version 15 onwards.

Hi, my name is David and first time watching my videos and you get value from the content that you watch, kindly consider liking this video and share it with your friends so we can all learn together.

The reason why I’m doing this video is because the captioning interface from previous versions of Premiere Pro CC has changed.

And it’s a better intuitive, transformative interface.

So basically, what I’m going to do is just show you the basics, what has come up, and then we just create a sample subtitle file so that you see how it works.

So we’ll begin by adding a project or creating a sequence.

We have our video here.

Let’s just create a new sequence from clip. And here’s our video inside here.

So the next thing we need to do is we need to select the captions from this particular tab. Let’s just click on it.

And once we do that, you’ll notice a couple of things.

Obviously, the interface changes slightly, where we have the caption area inside here, you can search you can move the captions up and down, you can add a new caption.

And then you have three dots on the side where you can add new caption track, export to SRT, export to txt file, etc.

From the particular inside– the captioning canvas, you can create new caption tracks, you can import caption files.

But also on the right, we get the essential graphics panel available. Because this new captioning interface really utilizes the essential graphics, so you can style your captions the way you want them to appear.

This is really important, especially if you’re creating social media videos, and you need to burn in your subtitles in the video with different caption layouts, etc.

So I’ll walk you through how you can easily create subtitles for your videos. So my assumption is this video has been edited, it’s complete and subtitling or captioning could be or should be, your final thing that you do.

That is if you want to avail captions to your –for your videos.

Also, the reason why I’m assuming Adobe has decided to do this is because accessibility is becoming of real importance, and their captioning interface has been extremely old, and all that.

And people want to make sure that everybody consumes their content.

So if if you can be able to caption your videos well and good.

If you also want to use automatic transcription and captioning applications, they’re available.

And I will link a video up above wherre I walk you through the 12 applications or websites that automatically transcribe audio or video to text or subtitles, or whatever you want.

So for this video, let’s just create a new caption.

And we’ll just click on that.

And the different formats you can select.

So we have same formats we had in the different or for example, in version 14 of Premiere Pro CC, Australian OP-47, CEA, this is more or less like broadcast, the old format, analog or type of captioning.

CEA 708, the newer version of 608, EBU subtitle, subtitle and this is what was titled open captions or open subtitling in the previous versions of Adobe, and then we have teletext.

Let’s say we want to burn in our subtitle to the video, we’ll just click on subtitle.

And since at the moment, we don’t have any style created, we’ll just work with the style of none, and then click on OK.

Now once we click OK, you’ll notice something.

There’s a new track here called subtitle.

This particular track is where our subtitles will be.

It’s a dedicated track for the subtitles that has been created inside Adobe Premiere Pro, which is pretty awesome.

Now, if we just try and adjust our waveform for our audio, because when your subtitling videos, one of the important things that you need to use is the waveform.

The waveform will guide you where to start, where to stop, etc. It’s really, really important, then we can just try and see the waveform a little bit clearer.

We can just adjust this slightly pull this back up a little bit. And then we just bring this down.

So that is what we have at the moment.

Let’s create or make or add a subtitle to this.

So I’ll place the playhead right where I want to start my subtitle, let’s say at that particular point.

And then once I do that, I’ll just click on add new caption segment.

Once I click on that will get a three second new caption block or segment and you can move it to whatever section you want.

But I recommend you either work with a one second to eight second caption segment.

Let’s say, we also need to use the waveform.

For example, let’s say we want our first caption, to end around this particular section.

So we can move this up to this point.

And then what we can do is we can listen to the dialogue here.

Sorry about that, let me wear my headphones.

“With the recent update on the YouTube interface,”

I go something like, let’s just double click inside your captions.

“With the recent update on the YouTube interface,”.

So let’s assume we have a comma there.

And then let’s see, we want to sub divide that into two, just press on enter there, looks good.

Has some styling.

Let’s just say, we have “With the recent update on the YouTube interface,” let’s just do it, first of all with it.

Let’s add another caption here.

And then let’s just move this maybe, to somewhere there.

Let’s play again.

“it’s now easier than before to download youtube transcripts.”

Double click.

“It’s now easier than before to download youtube transcripts.” So we can do before. Let’s see, we do another enter somewhere there.

Looks pretty good. Let’s say we first of all create those two lines.

So something we can do first of all is to ensure that we can use universally style our subtitles, let’s just press on control A.

And let’s say we want maybe to have to remove the shadow that we have here.

So we can just untick these from the essential graphics panel.

That is under edit.

Just click on untick that, but he noticed that our subtitles sort of disappear.

Something else we can add from this is we can do a background.

And once you click on that, you get good background with a 75% more or less opacity. Let’s just give it up to 100.

Something else we can do because I’m noticing as if subtitles are almost touching up here, we can just adjust this so that the subtitles are in the box.

Looks good.

But we can just try also try and decrease this particular transparency to about let’s say, 89– looks better.

And once you do that, that’s for potentially all the subtitles.

If you already have them here, you can style that once you’re done with your subtitles.

So if we click on the next subtitle, it has the style that we just set up. It’s pretty awesome.

So we can just basically just pull this back up.

And if you want to continue adding more lines, let’s just move this to this particular section. And then we can just move this sorry about that up to there.

And let’s say we also move this.

So we get back our options to add new caption segments, just click on that. Let’s see. I’m assuming here is where I introduced myself. Or let’s say we want to make this up to almost the this particular section.

Let’s listen through.

“Hi, my name is David from Freelancerinsights.com.”

Let’s say we want to get it up to there.

Where I go double click.

“Hi, my name is David from Freelancerinsights.com.”

So I can also do an enter from this particular section.

So we have the subtitles there.

Now the only thing that you might need to note is that if you apply the styles before you finish up with your subtitles, this particular subtitle will not pick the styles that we set up in here.

But what we can do is potentially while selecting this particular style, just come here and create a style and then name it whatever you want to name it so that you can use this style for the different captions that you are creating.

So with subtitling all you have to do is keep doing this particular process, it’s pretty tedious.

And I believe Adobe’s coming up with Adobe Sensei that will automatically analyze your audio, whatever track you select that you want to have subtitles for, and then automatically create a transcript that will be subtitled automatically using Adobe Sensei.

But the process is like this, you just keep doing it until you get to the end.

So if that is all you wanted to do, you just keep repeating this particular process, let’s just say you just keep repeating this particular process to the end.

If you’re satisfied with your subtitles, you can either decide to export them, or even burn to your video.

Let’s say you wanted to use this particular subtitle you’ve created on YouTube, because it improves on YouTube SEO.

You can just click on the three dots up here.

And they’ve made this pretty simple. Just click on that export to SRT file, which is a SubRip subtitle file.

And you can just title it whatever you want, let’s say “new captioning interface dot SRT”.

Or even if you leave it that way, it’s going to save as it is required, just click on Save.

And it’s already saved.

If you also wanted to export as a txt file, you can just click on that it is going to export as a plain text file.

Really depends if you wanted to use this particular subtitle file as a blog post.

So you can easily create it into plain text file that you can import into your blog and style it the way you want it.

So that’s a pretty basic rundown on how you can use the new captioning interface to create subtitles or closed captions in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2021 version 15.

But just to go over some few things is that it’s very easy to style or align your different subtitles.

For example, if this particular subtitle, “it’s now easier than before to download YouTube’s transcripts”.

Let’s say it’s obscuring some lower third graphics here, you can easily adjust the position either using the zones, or using the X or Y positioning. It’s pretty simple.

Let’s say we want to put it up up here, we just click on that it goes up there.

You can also use these X and Y axis to change these particular options.

Secondly, if you wanted to change from a subtitle that is open captions to let’s say something like closed caption file, you can just right click on the subtitle track, and then click on track settings.

And from this particular option, the format, you can click on subtitle and then change it to whatever you want.

Let’s say we change to CEA 708.

And then you have different caption stream service one up to service six.

Let’s say we want our caption stream to be service one.

If you have a style set up, like I’ve just displayed, you can use it and also the different styling options here.

If you’re doing European and East Asian, or South Asian and Middle East, I’m assuming this is right to left, etc.

But I would appreciate if they had a button or a checkbox here.

If you’re working with Arabic subtitles, once you take the right to left, if you text is now it’s now easier than before it comes to the side and before to the other end to on the side transcripts on the other end.

So that if you doing or working with Arabic, Hebrew or right to left languages, they easily conform to that.

Again, something else that I would be happy to see is to potentially be able to add more than two caption files at once, whether we have to import or create that will be really awesome if you can do that.

And that would help especially if you’re working with files that you want to have multiple subtitles burned into the video.

For example, if you want to have an Arabic file, if you want to have an English file, let’s say you have one liners that you want to be seen at the same time.

So as for changing the settings, we can just do that if you satisfied, just click OK.

And it’s going to change into a different format.

So just make sure that you see what is happening, we can just bring it down here.

And then we can change this particular background.

And by default, the background appearance is black by so black is translucent.

So if we change it to opaque then you can see what happens is there you cannot change that.

But something else that is really awesome is that you can change the font that you have here for this particular caption block alone.

So you can just change this let’s say to Verdana just click on that.

It’s changed if we look at this other one is still in Tahoma And this tile is still in the translucent option. And you can change that.

But you can also use the Ctrl A option when you select this.

So that’s a bunch of things that I’ve talked about in this, but that is how you can easily create subtitles and closed captions in Premiere Pro CC 2021 version 15 and beyond.

Thank you for watching this video.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comment section below. I’m hoping that Adobe will continue improving this particular captioning interface until it’s streamlined for people that want to use it for whatever they want to use it.

Thank you for watching this video.

Until next time, stay safe and never stop learning.

Thank you for watching this video.

Get Free Email Updates!

Signup now and receive an email once I publish new content.

I agree to have my personal information transfered to MailChimp ( more information )

I will never give away, trade or sell your email address. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.