The old Captions panel was in not only my opinion the worst panel in Premiere Pro. Very buggy and you couldn’t rely on a solid performance within it.
So as far as I understand they will deprecate the old panel and replace it with a brand new Text panel.
It will actually have 2 sections. Transcript’ and ‘Captions’.
In the first one, there’s a ‘Create Transcription’ button which makes me really hyped. Why?
Because it’s a ‘speech to text’ feature. Within Premiere Pro!
It means we’ll be able to automatically create a transcript for any video or audio clip with aligned pacing of spoken dialog that matches the video timecode. This feature will be powered by Adobe Sensei.
The remaining question is: will it be a paid feature? Or will the monthly fee we pay cover the expenses? It’s yet to be determined. I really hope it will be included or at least that there would be a monthly limit for free transcripts. Let’s say 100 minutes a month. Would be really sweet.
If you want to try it out, you’ll have to apply for early access.
Let’s have a short look at how this will work.
For now, it will support 12 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese), Korean.
Basically, there’s a dropdown menu where you choose a language, how many speakers are involved, and what audio should be analyzed. it’s a choice between auto-detect dialog, audio clips tagged as “Dialog”, and audio on a selected track.
However, the new captioning experience is already available in the public beta which you can download from the main Creative Cloud app.
So here’s a deal. They added a new type of a timeline track that can only contain captions or subtitles.
I must say that I think that’s a brilliant approach. Basically, there’s no learning curve as captions behave like regular clips that you can trim, move, ripple edit, etc.
The new Text panel provides easy navigation and a 2-way link between captions in the panel and the timeline. So if I click on any record, it will navigate the timeline to that point. And if I playback the timeline, the specific text will be highlighted in the panel.
BTW, you won’t see this new C1 track on the timeline at first. But as soon as you drag and drop any caption file onto a timeline, it will open automatically.
Changing the look of captions is achieved in the Essential Graphics panel which users are already used to. Plus, it’s super-rich in customization features so there’s really no limit to how your open captions will look like.
BTW, Adobe says that there will be full support for closed captions as well but once the feature is fully launched. Not in the public beta.
So yeah. I’m very happy that they finally did something to make the captioning experience bearable or who knows - maybe even enjoyable for some of you.
Working on captions like with regular clips that can be batch stylized and that will even adjust when using the Auto Reframe feature is definitely something we needed for years.
I always use REV.com to create a closed captions file that I can import to Premiere Pro and bake into a video file. Their accuracy is great and it’s such a time saver.
Use my link for USD 10 off your first caption order at rev. But I really hope that once ‘speech to text’ is fully launched in Premiere, there won’t be any necessity to use external services to get good captions.
However, there are still a lot of questions to be answered.
For example, what happens when we have multiple languages? Do we have more C tracks? How do we choose which one to include in the export?
When will closed captions be part of that new captions workflow as well? Without it, it’s really just useful for social media edits. But what about embedding closed captions files? How long will we have to wait?
You may recall that in May they added hardware encoding for H.264 and H.265 on Windows. Now they top it with H.264 and H.265 hardware decoding.
What does it mean for us? That if you have clips transcoded or recorded to these codecs, the playback will be smoother. If your GPU is supported of course. I’m sure Adobe will post a list of supported graphics cards.
BTW, if you struggle with Premiere Pro stability in any way, I have an eBook dedicated to the best practices for a stable editing workflow. It’s called Bulletproof Premiere Pro and by ordering your copy you also support my channel for which I thank you.
Adobe added color management for ARRI ProRes formats with embedded LUTs. It will be especially useful for HDR productions.
HDR workflows now include support for Rec2100 PQ color working space.
ProRes RAW can now be imported on Windows with all the major GPUs.
They also added support for ProRes RAW to LOG color space conversion.
