Tutorial: Producing Closed Captions in Adobe Premiere Pro CC
In this tutorial you'll learn how to create and edit industry-standard closed captions for video using the new closed-captioning capabilities in the just-released Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
In this tutorial I’ll introduce you to the new caption-related features in Premiere Pro Creative Cloud (CC). I’ll be using some of the assets from my book, Premiere Pro CC: Visual QuickStart Guide, which is available now on Amazon.
In terms of perspective, the new caption-related features are primarily designed to help people edit existing captions rather than creating new ones. As you’ll see, you can create new captions with the caption tools here, but it’s pretty tedious for anything longer than a one- or two-minute file.
Importing Captions into Premiere Pro as an MCC File
There are two ways to bring captions into Premiere Pro. You can bring them in embedded in a QuickTime file or you can bring them in as separate Scenarist (.scc) files or MacCaption (.mcc) files. For this tutorial we’ll use an MCC file. You cannot, in this version, bring in embedded captions in an MPEG-2 transport stream or any file that uses the MP4 or MPEG-2 importer. So if you want to create a file that you can import into Premiere Pro with captions I would suggest using QuickTime until Adobe adds MPEG-2 and MP4 import capabilities, which is definitely coming, just didn’t make it into the first version.
Figure 1 (below) shows the QuickTime file with the embedded captions highlighted in the Project panel. Click on it and Premiere Pro displays the captions in the file in the Source Monitor.
Figure 1. Displaying imported captions in the Source Monitor
To enable and disable caption display, click the Settings (wrench) button at the bottom of the Source Monitor to open the Settings dialog and toggle on and off the Closed Captions display (Figure 2, below).
Figure 2. Enable or disable captions display here.
You can also choose Closed Caption Settings from this dialog. You can choose the standard--CEA608 is NTSC, primarily the U.S., and Teletext in Europe (Figure 3, below).
Figure 3. Choosing the Closed Caption standard.
After you’ve chosen the standard, you can choose which stream (Figure 4, below). If there’s one caption file, typically, that’s going to be CC1. You have the same controls over caption display in the Program Monitor as well.
Figure 4. Choosing the caption file.
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