[Richard Clabaugh]

I’ve developed a few work around methods to get the H.264 with embedded captions that I need to deliver to clients, but it’s in multiple steps. Also I’m working on 30 second commercials that I have to deliver via upload to stations that require Closed Captions embedded in an H.264 file for upload. They don’t take sidecars and ProRes is too big to upload so not accepted.

For you the size of the material may be an issue, but here’s what I do.

First – Edit and do your captions as normal in your current version of Premiere Pro, then Export as a Quicktime ProRes file with the captions embedded for use an an intermediate master.

Once I’ve done that there are two ways I can get a final H.264 with captions.

Method 1
Step 1 – An older copy of Premiere Pro: I have an OLD copy of Premiere Pro in which I can open the exported ProRes file. While the old version will not open a newer Premiere Pro project file, it will open a ProRes file as that format has not changed.

Step 2 – From that program, I can still export an H.264 with embedded closed captions, so once I have that file open, I export the H.264 just like I used to.

I have two machines, one of which I keep the older Premiere Pro on, but if you have only one machine you can still do this by downloading an older version of Premiere Pro (it’s an option you have to dig for but it’s there in the subscription) and run that version only when you need to do this step.

This works on Mac or PC and requires no additional spending.

Method 2 – if working on a Mac:

A little bit of money (not a lot) but easier…

I downloaded Apple’s “Compressor” software ($50) and use that to convert the ProRes intermediate file to an H.264 with embedded captions. It’s one a single step and that’s pretty much all I use Compressor for, but it’s easier than working between two machines or keeping two versions of Premiere Pro installed.

Alternate: I you don’t want to work in ProRes – I believe you can marry a sidecar file to a video file in Compressor and export that way, which keeps you from having to make a large ProRes intermediate, but may result in a little loss of video quality as you re-compress H.264.

Yes, all of these are a pain in the butt and a stupid set of work arounds that should be unnecessary, but that’s what I’m doing to deliver the commercials I do for broadcast with embdded closed captions as I am required to do for the jobs I have.

I don’t understand why Adobe removed this feature from their products. I assume they must have to pay a license fee and decided it wasn’t worth it for most people, but it’s a major inconvenience for me as a working broadcast professional.

Sorry I don’t have a better method. If others do, I’m eager to hear it.

[Richard Clabaugh]

Imry,

This is the correct link the the procedure I am using:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/3/1009280

[Richard Clabaugh]

Imry – I have posted a work around to this problem in reply to your other post in the other thread here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/1003531

It’s multiple steps and may or may not work for you, but it’s what I’m doing to get H.264 files with closed captions embedded from projects edited in the current version of Premiere Pro.

Good luck!

[Richard Clabaugh]

I’ve developed a few work around methods to get the H.264 with embedded captions that I need to deliver to clients, but it’s in multiple steps. Also I’m working on 30 second commercials that I have to deliver via upload to stations that require Closed Captions embedded in an H.264 file for upload. They don’t take sidecars and ProRes is too big to upload so not accepted.

For you the size of the material may be an issue, but here’s what I do.

First – Edit and do your captions as normal in your current version of Premiere Pro, then Export as a Quicktime ProRes file with the captions embedded for use an an intermediate master.

Once I’ve done that there are two ways I can get a final H.264 with captions.

Method 1
Step 1 – An older copy of Premiere Pro: I have an OLD copy of Premiere Pro in which I can open the exported ProRes file. While the old version will not open a newer Premiere Pro project file, it will open a ProRes file as that format has not changed.

Step 2 – From that program, I can still export an H.264 with embedded closed captions, so once I have that file open, I export the H.264 just like I used to.

I have two machines, one of which I keep the older Premiere Pro on, but if you have only one machine you can still do this by downloading an older version of Premiere Pro (it’s an option you have to dig for but it’s there in the subscription) and run that version only when you need to do this step.

This works on Mac or PC and requires no additional spending.

Method 2 – if working on a Mac:

A little bit of money (not a lot) but easier…

I downloaded Apple’s “Compressor” software ($50) and use that to convert the ProRes intermediate file to an H.264 with embedded captions. It’s one a single step and that’s pretty much all I use Compressor for, but it’s easier than working between two machines or keeping two versions of Premiere Pro installed.

Alternate: I you don’t want to work in ProRes – I believe you can marry a sidecar file to a video file in Compressor and export that way, which keeps you from having to make a large ProRes intermediate, but may result in a little loss of video quality as you re-compress H.264.

Yes, all of these are a pain in the butt and a stupid set of work arounds that should be unnecessary, but that’s what I’m doing to deliver the commercials I do for broadcast with embdded closed captions as I am required to do for the jobs I have.

I don’t understand why Adobe removed this feature from their products. I assume they must have to pay a license fee and decided it wasn’t worth it for most people, but it’s a major inconvenience for me as a working broadcast professional.

Sorry I don’t have a better method. If others do, I’m eager to hear it.

[Richard Clabaugh]

Just asking, Dave, what codecs are the preferred delivery file formats at your station for commercials from outside producers that are to be uploaded to traffic with embedded captions? A few years ago I used to hand deliver disks with ProRes files, but now all the outlets want uploads to traffic in H.264 or MPEG compressed formats with no side-car files and captions embedded. My only point here being, at least in my market, it still has it’s value professionally, even if it is an “out dated” format. It’s still very much in professional use and it’s death seems a bit premature.

[Richard Clabaugh]

Thanks Ben,

Good to know but in my case, at least, there was no speed changes or interpretation being applied to any of the source clips.

So far as I know, and based on what I’ve read in this thread, this continues to be an unresolved problem. There are some work arounds, but they all start with importing the footage differently before you start the project. Once you’ve edited, if you discover the problem, you’re in a bad way.

This remains a bug I think Adobe needs to address.

[Richard Clabaugh]

Just to return to this since I started it and I see others are also still having this problem…

I had to drop dealing with it and just get the project out by manual conform/brute force, but I did begin to make some connections – none of it very useful for most of us.

There were four ways to digitize material that I triedL
1. Via Final Cur Pro “Log and Transfer”
2. Via Sony XDCam Transfer program (this is what I most often use)
3. Via Premiere Pro 4 directly
4. Via DaVinci Resolve (I usually do that only if I need to apply a LUT, which was not the case here)

The one that seemed to work best was if I digitized using Premiere Pro. Whatever timecode it created on import it than recognized and exported an XML that was consistent with itself, although not with what other programs read for the same material. All other programs still had a problem with it, but this produced the best results.

I consider this an unsolved bug as of that time. Have not done a project of this workflow since November, so have not checked it with the latest Premiere Pro. (Last thing I shot was on an Arri Alexa and I’m not editing it).

I just didn’t want to leave everyone hanging and not knowing how it turned out.

Hopefully someone will resolve this.

[Richard Clabaugh]

Same thing exactly here! In the last 3 days Premiere Pro has prompted me 3-times to sign in to stop running the “trial” version of the program.

THEN – today — It gave me the sequence read error message when I tried to open my project.

I took the drive to another machine in my office and the project opened with no problem at all. Saved it, walked it back to the first machine, and it opened fine – no problem.

No idea what’s going on, but thought it interesting we’re having the same problem and symptoms.

[Richard Clabaugh]

Thought I’d share an update.

In short, the problem remains unresolved be we’ve covered a lot of ground.

First, thanks to David Roth Weiss for looking over the clip and confirming what I found – Adobe programs read the timecode one way, every other program reads it another way. Since then I have tried several things he suggested and spent days trying to determine the cause and create some work arounds. I have tried more than I care to itemize here right now, but suffice to say the problem has not gone away and no quick fixes, or slow fixes, have revealed themselves. The problem continues to defy all logic and the attempts to fix have created only more puzzlers.

My final “work around” for the time being, after a very long list, was that Adobe Media Encoder also reads the timecode in the same manner as Adobe Premiere — so I used it to transcode the XDCam files into ProRes files and in the process it embeded within those files the same (incorrect) timecode that Adobe Premiere Pro was showing. This, at least, gave me a piece of “source” video I could bring into other programs and they would then find the right spots in the video to match what Premiere listed in it’s exported XML file. With this, I was able to do color correction in DaVinci Resolve on the first of seven segments for the show I’m working on.

Other than that, the situation has gotten worse as several other segments that appeared to be fine have turned out to have similar read errors within Premiere when I export them – but inconsistently.

The latest is I opened an edit delivered to me by an editor, who worked on Premiere Pro for Windows, made sure it was good on one machine here in my office (Premiere Pro CC 2115 on my iMac) and all was good. Copied the project (and footage) to another drive, took it to another machine in my office (also an iMac running the same version of Premier Pro) and when it opened everything was wrong – the timecode had read differently between the two machines and this time Premiere Pro didn’t match up to it’s own timeline.

My deadline for delivery is this weekend and I’m using brute force workarounds at the moment and several of them have failed.

I just want to conclude by saying — after considerable testing – this definitely appears to be a bug within the program – at least as far as I’m concerned. If a program cannot read the timecode consistently, it should either show some kind of error message or start counting from 00:00:00:00 at the head of the clip. At least that tells you there’s a problem. To display what appears to be a perfectly valid timecode, only to have it turn out to be different from all other non-Adobe apps seems like a problem to me. As stated in my original post, I am NOT the only person to encounter this.

If I can find a real cause or solution to this I’ll post it here. Meanwhile, I’ve just got to get this job out.

Just didn’t want to leave everyone hanging!

This problem remains unresolved.

[Richard Clabaugh]

Sent you an email with a link to a file along with details on what my system shows for the timecode in various programs.

Thanks for trying to help out here.