Hey, my name is Matt Johnson, and today
I'm going to be showing you how to quickly and easily transcribe and add captions
to your videos for free using Adobe Premiere Pro! To start, open up Premiere and you're going to want to make sure
that you're on at least version 15.0, but I really recommend
being on at least version 22.0 because this version added
a really cool new captions feature that we're going to be talking about
in a minute. With Premiere Pro open, you first
need to edit a video and be basically done and ready to export
because adding captions is going to be the final step that you take
before you export. The reason it's the final step
is that if you end up needing to make any changes to your video,
especially to the length of it, you are going to need
to recreate those captions again so they sync properly
with your videos audio. All right, let's pretend that this video
on my timeline is already edited, and I'm ready to add captions to it
and export it in your workspaces. At the top, you're going to notice
a new workspace option called captions. Click that and then you'll see
that you have two new panels, a transcript panel and a captions panel. The captions
panel is the one that you want and you're going to want to first click
Transcribe sequence. You're probably thinking now, Matt. The second option here says
Create new caption track. I want to create captions.
Why shouldn't I click on that? The reason you want to click
Transcribe Sequence first is that you need to do things in order. If you create a captions track
without transcribing your audio, the captions are going to be blank
unless you want to type them in manually. And I said, this
tutorial is how to quickly and easily create captions, and typing them in
manually is definitely not easy. So click Transcribe Sequence
and then under transcription settings for audio analysis,
you're going to want to select audio on track, and then you're going
to want to select the track that your spoken dialog is on that
you want to create captions for. If your audio was just on one track,
you can click on the dropdown menu and select audio to three or four,
whichever track your spoken dialog is on. In my case,
it would be audio, too, but if your dialog is on multiple tracks,
you're going to want to select mics. Where you want to be careful, though,
is that if you select mics and you have music tracks
as well as dialog, then Premiere Pro
will also listen to those. And there's a chance that it may start
adding lyrics from the songs into the captions as well. If you want to avoid that,
it's actually very simple. Close this window and we'll pretend
the track one is a music track. Make sure that it is muted
and as long as it is muted whenever you select mics,
Premiere is going to ignore those music tracks back to transcribe sequence. Now for language, you can choose English
or any other language you happen to be speaking in your video. Do keep in mind, though if your video
has multiple languages being spoken, I would separate out these
different languages on a different tracks, and then I would transcribe this
audio multiple times, selecting a different language
from the dropdown menu every time and checking this box
to merge output with existing transition. You can leave, Transcribe and PowerPoint
only unchecked if you want to create captions
for your entire video. And if you have different speakers,
this checkbox to opt into recognizing when different speakers are talking
can be really useful in this case. For this video, it was just me speaking,
so I'm going to leave it alone. And lastly,
all you need to do is press transcribe. Premiere will then immediately begin transcribing the sequence
by rendering out the audio, then uploading it to Adobe servers,
where they have some very powerful speech analysis tools that will create text
from the speech and or video. You'll then get a timer for how long
this is estimated to take. In my case, this is about a twelve minute
long video, and Adobe says it's going to take four minutes. Once that is done, you'll notice that the transcript panel
is now open and look at that. Premiere has now automatically transcribed
all of the audio in your video into text and organized it
into captions with timing. This is where things get really cool
because you can click on any of this text and notice that Premiere will automatically scrub
to that part of the timeline. You can then hit play and Premiere will highlight
each word of the text as it's spoken. This is the point where I recommend either
watching through your video completely or at least reading the transcript,
because while I would say the Premiere Pro captions are around
90% accurate, every once in a while, a word will throw a curveball
and they'll get confused, or it'll format a word incorrectly. Thankfully,
if you want to change any of the text in your captions, in this case
it should be ah, instead of were, you can simply select the word,
then double click on it and start typing. Ah, there we go. Click away to save that now
with your transcription proofread, it's time
to turn this transcription into captions. To do that, you're going to want to click this
big create captions button at the top, and then you're going to make sure
that create from sequence transcript is selected. Otherwise your captions will be blank. For caption presets, I would leave it to
subtitle default format, subtitle style. None. Of course,
if you're creating captions for a client and they want something specific
for their captions, you have plenty of other options
here to choose from. But I've found that the default works
great for YouTube, Facebook
and other sites that accept captions for the maximum length, maximum
duration and gap between captions. I found the default of. 42, three and zero to be great. And double lines works great as well. Next, press, create and Premiere will tell
you it's creating captions and tada. Look at that. You will now see
a new track appear on your timeline that says subtitle at the start,
and you suddenly have hundreds, if not thousands, of new clips
that represent different parts of text in your video. Now here's where you need to make
a decision because you have two options. You need to decide whether you want
to bake your captions into your video, where they will always be visible and
actually be a part of the video itself. Or you can have your captions
saved to a separate file, also known as a sidecar file that can be uploaded
to YouTube or Facebook. I typically go with this second sidecar
file approach, so we'll cover that first, then circle
back to baking in your captions. Now, do you remember how I said
at the start of this video that I recommend
updating Premiere Pro to version 22.0? The reason that I recommend updating to
this version is that in the past, if you wanted to create a sidecar file
of your captions that you could upload to YouTube or Facebook, etc., you would actually have
to go through the entire process of exporting your entire video,
which could potentially take quite a while and can be quite a pain
if all you want is a captions file. Thankfully, with version
22.0 of Premiere Pro, Adobe changed this, and all you have to do to export this
sidecar file is go up to these three dots and select export to SRT file. Let's name
this video captions and press save, and you now have a file that contains
all of your captions with all the timings, and all you need to do is after you upload
your video to YouTube, select subtitles. Then select
these little dots here and select Upload File with timing. Continue. Select your video captions that SRT file
and you're done. Alternatively,
if you're up live in your caption file to Facebook,
you're going to want to change the title of your captions to include the text
that in underscore U.S. at the end of your file name . So it would be video
caption start in underscore U.S. for this caption file. This tells Facebook
that these are English captions. If you try to upload your captions file
without doing this, Facebook will give you an error. All you have to do
then, is upload your video to Facebook. Go to the Captions tab for your video
and select Upload to upload your captions file. Now, if you are using a previous version
of Premiere Pro, such as version 15.0 and you don't want to update to a later
version due to stability, for example, then to export your captions, it's
just going to take one extra step. Go to export your video like you normally
would by opening up the export media dialog box and Premiere by pressing
control IM on PC or Command Im on Mac. Select all of your export settings and then go over here to the Captions tab
and under caption options. You're going to want to make sure
that you select, create sidecar file, then export
your video as you normally would. And next to your video file,
you're going to notice there's a Sidecar SRT file that you can
then uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, etc.. All right, we've covered how to create a
separate file that includes your captions. Let's now tackle how to burn captions into your videos
so they will always be visible. This is actually super simple to do
and is a great way to heavily customize your captions. If you want to give them a specific
look, teddy your captions and give them a distinct
look by changing the font or the color. Go up to the type tool in the top middle
and then click on your captions and you're going to see that
a large red box appears around them. Then on the right, you'll see
the essential graphics panel opens up, and this is going to give you
a lot of control over your captions. For example,
you can select all of this text and then change your font
to Ariel, for example. And let's also change the file to yellow. With this change,
you're going to notice that you've unfortunately
only changed this specific caption. All of the other captions are still white
with the old font. How do we fix this? Do not worry, you do not need to change
all of your captions by hand. That would be a huge pain. Instead, just make changes
to one of your captions, text boxes and then to make all of your other
captions look like these captions go up here
to Trek Style and click this up arrow. And it's going to say push style
attributes. Make sure that all captions on track
are selected. Press OK and voila! All of the captions have been updated
to this font and style very easily and quickly. Now let's export these baked in captions. Press control them on PC
or command em on Mac. To bring up the Export Settings
Dialog box, select all of your settings, then
go over here to the Captions tab again. And for export options, you're
going to want to make sure that you select burn captions into video,
then simply select queue or export, and your video will be exported
with the captions baked in and they will look amazing
just like you designed them to be. Now, before we finish,
I have one final warning for you. If you create captions for your video,
then you go to export your video, but you forget to go over here
to the Captions tab. By default, Premiere is going to choose
to automatically. Are in captions into your video,
meaning that you may get a surprise whenever you play your video and see
captions to keep that from happening, you can either select
none here in the export options or you can cancel out of your export
and this little eyeball next to your subtitle track. Click that and that's going to hide
all of your captions without, you know, know how to quickly and easily
create captions and Adobe Premiere Pro. Please
consider liking this video and subscribing if you want to see more videos
about Premiere Pro in the future. Thank you so much for watching
and have a great day.
