YouTube automatically adds CC, also known as Closed Captions, to your videos, but what if you want them embedded inside your video for a better style or to publish on another platform?

That’s where Premiere pro subtitles and captions come in. You can manually or automatically generate captions without paying extra for transcription services. If you’ve already paid for Adobe Cloud, they won’t charge you extra. Since the feature was introduced in the latest version of the software, make sure you download an up-to-date version from the following link below.

How to add captions and subtitles in Premiere Pro

  • Launch Premiere Pro and insert your audio clip.
  • Switch to the Captions and Graphics panel and select Text -> Captions
  • You’ll have 3 options to choose from. Transcribe Sequence, Create new caption track, and Import captions from the file.
  • Transcribe sequence is the option we’ll choose since it automatically creates transcription of the speech, while others require you to transcribe them manually and install them as a file.

Once you click on Transcribe Sequence, settings pop up will appear, giving you a few options. You could select only audio clips you tagged as Dialogue. We showed you how to do that in our volume adjusting tutorial or just the audio on selected tracks. You could also select transcription language. By default, English, US is selected, but you can change it to UK English and additionally install other languages such as Chinese, Spanish, Korean, German, French, and many others.

Transcribe in point to outpoint only option lets you transcribe only the selected bit of an audio clip. You can also recognize different speakers. If you select that option Premiere, Pro will recognize different people speaking and give each speaker a different styling, so it’s easier for viewers to figure out who’s talking.

  • When you are ready, click on Transcribe.

This process might take some time depending on the length of your audio, and it requires an internet connection. Because the transcription process is done on Adobe Cloud servers.

When completed, you’ll see the following screen. No matter how advanced, no AI can create perfect captions. So there might be errors and typos here and there. You can quickly go over and fix them by double-clicking on the word.

When finished fixing typos in your subtitles, click create captions and Premiere Pro will let you adjust a few more styling settings.

You can change the text format, apply style from saved layouts, set character length, and pick single or double line captions. We mostly prefer a single line as it takes less space on the screen. When you are happy, click on Create button, and your subtitles will be applied to your video.

How to move captions in Premiere Pro

Once you’ve created your captions, they will look like this in your timeline and have their own track.

We’ve never had issues with misplaced captions that don’t match with the video, but if you must move and adjust their timing, you can grab them by the edges, change their length and drag on the timeline just like a clip.

How to create a VTT file in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro, unfortunately, doesn’t support VTT files by default. But you can save them as an SRT, text, and CSV file by clicking on triple dots on your settings.

Once you save it as an SRT file, HappyScribe converts your SRT file to WebVTT (VTT). The process takes a second and better alternative to install Premiere Pro extensions to export VTT.

Did this tutorial help you with what you were looking for? We publish dozens of guides like this every week. If you have a problem you are looking to solve, let us know in the comments, and we’ll see if we can help you.

Happy editing!