Subtitling: Premiere Pro vs Swift

[Joe Bender]

I’m sure there are others who can answer this question better than I can, but from my limited experience as a relatively new Premiere user, you have a couple of options. You can import SRT files directly to Premiere as closed captions, which keeps them more mobile but severely limits your formatting options, or you can use a script called pt_ImportSubtitles (https://aescripts.com/pt_importsubtitles/) to import them through After Effects as regular title items. The second option is probably better for your purposes, since you can define a template and it sounds like you won’t be authoring the titles in Premiere, but just using it to burn them in.
That said, if you already have your clean video mastered and you just need to make language-specific versions with burned-in titles, you may well be better off using a titling-specific program (I’m not familiar with Swift).

Hope that helps!

[Adi Frank]

Thanks Joe.
You’re assumptions are about right.
I’ll receive a ready video with English audio which will need to be transcribed.
The transcriptions will need to be broken down to an English “source” subtitle SRT file, including timecode in/outs for each segment.

Then the English source SRT will be sent out for translations. It is very possible that the translations will need to be later segmented differently from the English because of text expansion/reduction. For example German or French text tends to take up more space compared to English, while Japanese or Chinese usually take up less space.

Then I’ll import the translated SRT files and check, with the help of a linguist, that the subtitles are correct and timed appropriately.

Once done, I will need to render the video with each of the target language subtitles.

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