• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Can’t find a way to maintain subtitle formatting when sending to Vimeo

  Posted by Anthony Popolo on September 3, 2025 at 7:03 pm

  I can’t seem to find the solution to keep the location, drop shadow, and background formats when creating captioning in PPro across to Vimeo. In PPro, I created the captions as “subtitle” so it gave me formatting options in Essential Graphics panel. CEA-708 does not offer those options. I justified titles lower left, white text, with drop shadow, no background. By the time it gets to vimeo, it’s white text on a black background, centered. See image.

  Heres what I’ve tried:

  – From captions panel, exported as .rst (since WebVTT does not appear to be available in PPro). I understand Vimeo prefers WebVTT format. I ensured it did it with the UTF-8 encoder. Converted that .srt file from a few 3rd party converters to .vtt then imported to Vimeo, but all the results were the same: white text on black background, centered.

  – I tried to export video through “export>media” and selected the “create sidecar file option” for captions, and checked the box that said “include SRT styling”. I used that file and again did a 3rd party conversion to vtt. Same result.

  I did inspect the .srt file in TextEdit and noticed there were no formatting type notations. I also checked the converted .vtt files and it did have the WEBVTT header, and all commas in timecodes were replaced with decimal points. I couldn’t find any options within Vimeo to address this.

  Am I missing something else?

  Thanks

  

  Ivan Eldredge replied 9 months, 2 weeks ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Ivan Eldredge

  September 3, 2025 at 8:16 pm

  Hello Anthony!

  This isn’t a mistake on your part, it’s just how captions work. Formats like SRT or VTT only store text and timing, not styling (position, shadows, backgrounds, etc.). Vimeo then applies its own default look to all sidecar captions, which is why yours always appear centered with a black background.

  If you want your custom style from Essential Graphics to show exactly as you designed it, you’ll need to burn the captions into the video when exporting. The trade-off is they’ll always be visible, not toggleable. If you need them as optional captions, you’ll have to use Vimeo’s default style.

  Good luck with your project!

  Best,

  Ivan Eldredge G.

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