Closed captioning ideas

[Bret Hampton]

John

The Beta version of PP does speech to text transcription. You should be able to output an SCC file (I haven’t tried yet).

However the accuracy is very good.

Just go to your CC account and select Beta apps. Everyone can use it now and it’s no extra charge.

[John Watts]

We are already having the SCC file made out of house. I need a software to encode into the show. Everything I’m looking at is fairly expensive. I don’t expect PP to do that part.

[Rob Mcgreevy]

Hi John,

What kind of file do you have to deliver? What software do you use to edit your video? Both Premiere Pro and Apple Compressor do embedded captioning. That said, they each have their caveats. Premiere Pro only can embed captions into a .MXF Op1a file and Apple Compressor can do MPEG-2. To use Premiere Pro you would need to import your .scc file and place it on the timeline of your show and then export the file. One thing you need to know is that as of a month ago this workflow was not working for me in the current version of Premiere Pro, but it was on the previous version. (Adobe somehow broke this on the current version) Not sure if it’s been fixed, but I have since moved on to using Apple Compressor. In Apple Compressor you import your show and your .scc file and then render the file out with the captioning embedded as an MPEG-2 file. If you don’t have any editing software and have an Apple computer it’s probably the least expensive route to as Apple Compressor is only $49.99 USD on the App Store. To use Premiere Pro you’ll have to have a Creative Cloud subscription which is a monthly cost depending on what plan you sign up for. As far as turnaround it takes us about the same time as the length of the show to render on our i7 iMac with 32GB of RAM and a 4GB video card. So a 30 min show usually finishes in 30 min or so.

Hopefully this helps a little.

[John Watts]

We have to put out an MPEG 2 file for distribution.

I do have Apple Compressor.

Editing is done on Premier Pro.

I’ll give the compressor solution a shot and see how it works.

Thanks, I’ll update when I get a chance to test.

[Rich Rubasch]

Compressor will do it. There is a place to point to the SCC file…works like a charm for MPEG 2 outputs. I’m sure you can Google the exact steps to get it to work, but it works!

[Oliver Peters]

I don’t understand the original question. What software do you think you need, since you are editing in Premiere Pro? The current version has an excellent captioning feature.

Our process is to use Rev.com to create the captions. These are human-reviewed and you can edit the captions easily online and then download the desired format. If we need faster, automated turnaround, then we use Simonsays.ai. Same deal, except you’ll have to do a bit more manual editing to fix errors.

In both cases, download the file in the desired format and import that into Premiere. Create a caption track in your Premiere Pro sequence and drag-and-drop the caption file at the proper start point. You can do further edited of the text, formatting, and edit point in Premiere.

When you export, you can choose to embed (closed captions), export a sidecar file (.srt), or “burn” into the video (subtitles).

[John Watts]

Very much thanks to everyone who has contributed. I am almost there.

During this downtime I updated to Big Sur and Premier 15.0. This has allowed me

to drop the .scc file on the timeline. However, i still need to export the caption file as an embedded CEA 608. The only options on Premier at export are the sidecar, or burn in video.

I find it difficult to understand why Adobe would give you all the functionality of laying down a captioning file, but, no way to truly embed it as a CEA 608 into a video file like mpeg2, Prores and the like.

Apple compressor is suppose to be able to do it, but, my limited experience with it is not giving me results I need.

Thanks again…

love the hive mind.