Pls help! Subtitling in Premiere for eventual WM encoding…

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere (any version) doesn’t support adding subtitle stream data to a WMV file. (You can always use embedded subtitles- subtitles that are part of the image in each frame. But you can’t turn those off.) Your best bet is probably to use another encoding application to add the subtitle stream after the fact.

I would suggest that the Microsoft Windows Media Encoder app might be your best bet, but I can’t see a way to add subtitles there. I can’t find confirmation that the WMV format even supports it. Are you sure you can do this?

[Roger Cassidy]

I have found one software so far after my posting here – http://www.eztitles.com – that does integrate with Premiere to create subtitles. I am still in the process of evaluating this. Another recommendation I have received is to use After Effects. I am researching both those options right now. After Effects certainly sounds like a good option, if it works out. I have to add 100’s of subtitles, so unless I can upload a text file, it will be cumbersome…let’s see… Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. Any other suggestions are most welcome!

[Tim Kurkoski]

The big problem I see you facing is not creating the subtitles, but how to embed them in a video file. With the right software, you can embed Closed Caption information in broadcast-standard files like DV and MPEG-2. But when I Googled for information on support for captions or subtitles in WMV, I only found one article on the MSDN site that indicated it was possible. And at that, the indication was that the captions would have to go into the “synchronized lyrics” stream of the file.

https://blogs.msdn.com/toub/archive/2005/09/17/470491.aspx

I’m not saying it’s not possible to do, but the tools for doing it seem pretty rare, and you may have a tough time getting it done. All in all, my guess is that you won’t need to input your subtitles into Premiere (or AE), but have them in a text file with properly formatted timecode, and some other program will do the integration work for you.

[Roger Cassidy]

Thanks again for your time in doing the research for me. It is so amazing to see how helpful folks can be in a forum. I will certainly read that article. EZTitle’s Premiere Plugin does exactly what you described – takes a txt file input and overlays that text on the avi file. This way when you encode for WM, the text is permanently there. This approach will work for me…only thing the software is not that flexible. If you want more features, you have to buy their standalone version, massage the text and then feed it in…unlike Adobe Encore which makes it so easy.