Hey, my name is Matt Johnson, and today I'm going to be showing you how to quickly
and easily transcribe and add captions to your videos for free
using Adobe Premiere Pro!
To start, open up Premiere
and you're going to want to make sure that you're on at least version 15.0,
but I really recommend being on at least version 22.0
because this version added a really cool new captions feature
that we're going to be talking about in a minute.
With Premiere Pro open, you first need to edit a video and be basically done
and ready to export because adding captions is going to be
the final step that you take before you export.
The reason it's the final step is that if you end up needing to make
any changes to your video, especially to the length of it,
you are going to need to recreate those captions again
so they sync properly with your videos audio.
All right, let's pretend that this video on my timeline is already edited,
and I'm ready to add captions to it and export it in your workspaces.
At the top, you're going to notice a new workspace option called captions.
Click that and then you'll see that you have two new panels, a
transcript panel and a captions panel.
The captions panel is the one that you want
and you're going to want to first click Transcribe sequence.
You're probably thinking now, Matt.
The second option here says Create new caption track.
I want to create captions. Why shouldn't I click on that?
The reason you want to click Transcribe Sequence first
is that you need to do things in order.
If you create a captions track without transcribing your audio,
the captions are going to be blank unless you want to type them in manually.
And I said, this tutorial is how to quickly and easily
create captions, and typing them in manually is definitely not easy.
So click Transcribe Sequence and then under transcription settings
for audio analysis, you're going to want to select
audio on track, and then you're going to want to select the track
that your spoken dialog is on that you want to create captions for.
If your audio was just on one track, you can click on the dropdown menu
and select audio to three or four, whichever track your spoken dialog is on.
In my case, it would be audio, too, but if your dialog
is on multiple tracks, you're going to want to select mics.
Where you want to be careful, though, is that if you select mics
and you have music tracks as well as dialog,
then Premiere Pro will also listen to those.
And there's a chance that it may start adding lyrics from the songs
into the captions as well.
If you want to avoid that, it's actually very simple.
Close this window and we'll pretend the track one is a music track.
Make sure that it is muted and as long as it is muted
whenever you select mics, Premiere is going to ignore those music
tracks back to transcribe sequence.
Now for language, you can choose English or any other language
you happen to be speaking in your video.
Do keep in mind, though if your video has multiple languages being spoken,
I would separate out these different languages on a different tracks,
and then I would transcribe this audio multiple
times, selecting a different language from the dropdown menu every time
and checking this box to merge output with existing transition.
You can leave, Transcribe and PowerPoint only unchecked
if you want to create captions for your entire video.
And if you have different speakers, this checkbox to opt into recognizing
when different speakers are talking can be really useful in this case.
For this video, it was just me speaking, so I'm going to leave it alone.
And lastly, all you need to do is press transcribe.
Premiere will then immediately begin
transcribing the sequence by rendering out the audio,
then uploading it to Adobe servers, where they have some very powerful speech
analysis tools that will create text from the speech and or video.
You'll then get a timer for how long this is estimated to take.
In my case, this is about a twelve minute long video, and Adobe says it's
going to take four minutes.
Once that is done,
you'll notice that the transcript panel is now open and look at that.
Premiere has now automatically transcribed all of the audio
in your video into text and organized it into captions with timing.
This is where things get really cool because you can click on any of this text
and notice
that Premiere will automatically scrub to that part of the timeline.
You can
then hit play and Premiere will highlight each word of the text as it's spoken.
This is the point where I recommend either watching through your video completely
or at least reading the transcript, because while I would say the Premiere Pro
captions are around 90% accurate, every once in a while,
a word will throw a curveball and they'll get confused,
or it'll format a word incorrectly.
Thankfully, if you want to change any of the text
in your captions, in this case it should be ah, instead of were,
you can simply select the word, then double click on it and start typing.
Ah, there we go.
Click away to save that now with your transcription
proofread, it's time to turn this transcription into captions.
To do that,
you're going to want to click this big create captions button at the top,
and then you're going to make sure that create from sequence
transcript is selected.
Otherwise your captions will be blank.
For caption presets, I would leave it to subtitle default format, subtitle style.
None.
Of course, if you're creating captions for a client
and they want something specific for their captions,
you have plenty of other options here to choose from.
But I've found that the default works great
for YouTube, Facebook and other sites that accept captions
for the maximum length, maximum duration and gap between captions.
I found the default of.
42, three and zero to be great.
And double lines works great as well.
Next, press, create and Premiere will tell you it's creating captions and tada.
Look at that.
You will now see a new track appear on your timeline
that says subtitle at the start, and you suddenly have hundreds,
if not thousands, of new clips that represent different parts of text
in your video.
Now here's where you need to make a decision because you have two options.
You need to decide whether you want to bake your captions into your video,
where they will always be visible and actually be a part of the video itself.
Or you can have your captions saved to a separate file, also known
as a sidecar file that can be uploaded to YouTube or Facebook.
I typically go with this second sidecar file approach,
so we'll cover that first, then circle back to baking in your captions.
Now, do you remember how I said at the start of this video
that I recommend updating Premiere Pro to version 22.0?
The reason that I recommend updating to this version is that in the past,
if you wanted to create a sidecar file of your captions that you could upload
to YouTube
or Facebook, etc., you would actually have to go through the entire process
of exporting your entire video, which could potentially take quite a while
and can be quite a pain if all you want is a captions file.
Thankfully, with version 22.0 of Premiere Pro, Adobe changed this,
and all you have to do to export this sidecar file is go up to these three dots
and select export to SRT file.
Let's name this video captions and press save,
and you now have a file that contains all of your captions with all the timings,
and all you need to do is after you upload your video to YouTube, select subtitles.
Then select these little dots here and select
Upload File with timing.
Continue.
Select your video captions that SRT file and you're done.
Alternatively, if you're up live in your caption file
to Facebook, you're going to want to change the title
of your captions to include the text that in underscore U.S.
at the end of your file name .
So it would be video caption start in underscore U.S.
for this caption file.
This tells Facebook that these are English captions.
If you try to upload your captions file without doing this, Facebook
will give you an error. All you have to do then, is upload your video to Facebook.
Go to the Captions tab for your video and select Upload
to upload your captions file.
Now, if you are using a previous version of Premiere Pro, such as version 15.0
and you don't want to update to a later version due to stability, for example,
then to export your captions, it's just going to take one extra step.
Go to export your video like you normally would by opening up the export media
dialog box and Premiere by pressing control IM on PC or Command Im on Mac.
Select all of your export settings
and then go over here to the Captions tab and under caption options.
You're going to want to make sure that you select,
create sidecar file, then export your video as you normally would.
And next to your video file, you're going to notice there's a Sidecar
SRT file that you can then uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, etc..
All right, we've covered how to create a separate file that includes your captions.
Let's now tackle
how to burn captions into your videos so they will always be visible.
This is actually super simple to do and is a great way to heavily
customize your captions.
If you want to give them a specific look, teddy
your captions and give them a distinct look by changing the font or the color.
Go up to the type tool in the top middle and then click on your captions
and you're going to see that a large red box appears around them.
Then on the right, you'll see the essential graphics panel opens up,
and this is going to give you a lot of control over your captions.
For example, you can select all of this text
and then change your font to Ariel, for example.
And let's also change the file to yellow.
With this change, you're going to notice that you've
unfortunately only changed this specific caption.
All of the other captions are still white with the old font.
How do we fix this?
Do not worry, you do not need to change all of your captions by hand.
That would be a huge pain.
Instead, just make changes to one of your captions, text boxes
and then to make all of your other captions look like these captions
go up here to Trek Style and click this up arrow.
And it's going to say push style attributes.
Make sure that all captions on track are selected.
Press OK and voila!
All of the captions have been updated to this font and style very easily
and quickly.
Now let's export these baked in captions.
Press control them on PC or command em on Mac.
To bring up the Export Settings Dialog box,
select all of your settings, then go over here to the Captions tab again.
And for export options, you're going to want to make sure that you select
burn captions into video, then simply select queue or export,
and your video will be exported with the captions baked in
and they will look amazing just like you designed them to be.
Now, before we finish, I have one final warning for you.
If you create captions for your video, then you go to export your video,
but you forget to go over here to the Captions tab.
By default, Premiere is going to choose to automatically.
Are in captions into your video, meaning that you may get a surprise
whenever you play your video and see captions to keep that from happening,
you can either select none here in the export options
or you can cancel out of your export and this little eyeball
next to your subtitle track.
Click that and that's going to hide all of your captions without,
you know, know how to quickly and easily create captions and Adobe Premiere Pro.
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if you want to see more videos about Premiere Pro in the future.
Thank you so much for watching and have a great day.