Creating Captions and Transcripts Using Adobe Premiere

Goal

To provide accessible content (captioned video & transcript) for online courses.

Task

Generate, and review/correct, captions and a transcript using Adobe Premiere’s auto-caption feature. 

Premiere’s auto-caption feature does a pretty good job recognizing words but it WILL MAKE MISTAKES. In order to comply with ADA requirements, these captions need to be reviewed and corrected in order to achieve as close to 100% accuracy as possible. Please see DLINQ’s Caption Style Guide for guidelines as to what to include and omit, length of captions, etc.

Instructions

If you prefer a visual guide, please view slides with screenshots

  • If you have not already done so, install Adobe Premiere Pro on your computer. 
  • Open Premiere and click the “New Project” button (or select File > New > Project).
  • Give the project a file name (e.g., “IML_Module1Overview”) and use the “Browse” button to locate where on your computer you’d like to save the project. You can leave all the other settings on their defaults and click “OK.”
  • Choose the Captions layout option from the top tabs. If you don’t see this option, navigate to Window > Workspaces > Captions to find it.
  • Import the video you want to caption by navigating to File > Import. You could alternatively drag and drop a file from a desktop folder onto the project block that reads “Import Media to Start.”
    • If you have used Panopto to create your video, you will need to download the video from Panopto to your computer in order to open it and work on it in Premiere.
  • Once the imported video appears in the Project block, drag and drop it onto the Timeline block. You should then see the video appear on the timeline.
  • From the caption area of the Source block, click on the Transcript tab, and then select “Create Transcription.”
  • If there is only one speaker in the video, leave all the settings at their default and click “Transcribe Sequence.” If there are multiple speakers, select “Opt in to recognizing when different speakers are talking,” then select “Enable” and “Transcribe.”
  • Do NOT generate captions yet. Once the video transcript gets generated, review and edit it first by playing the video. To play the video, press your space bar, or click the play icon under the video preview in the Program block. 
  • The words will be highlighted in the transcript text area as the audio plays. Double-click in the transcript text to make a correction. If you click outside the text area of the transcript when you’re done making your edit, you should be able to restart the audio from where it left off.
  • To search and replace a commonly misspelled word, enter the text you want to find in the Search field. That item will then be highlighted throughout the transcript. To find the “Replace” option, click the double-curved-arrows icon. Enter your corrected text into the “Replace with” field and choose either “Replace” (to replace once) or “Replace All” (to replace wherever that text appears throughout the entire transcript).
  • Once you are done making corrections to the transcript, click “Create Captions.”
  • Leave the caption options set to their defaults and click “Create.”
  • Once the captions are generated, from the Captions tab, click the three horizontal dots and choose “Export to SRT file…”
  • Then navigate to the Transcript tab and click the three horizontal dots and choose “Export to text file…” If you are using a newer version of Adobe Premiere Pro in Windows OS, you may not see an option to export the transcript to a text file, or it may export with timestamps included. In this case, you have several options to remove timestamps:
    • Instead of exporting the Transcript as text, export it as a CRV file. You can then open the CRV file in Excel, select the column that has the transcript text in it, and copy and paste that column as plain text into a Word or other text-based document. You’ll need to do some paragraph / line formatting cleanup, but won’t have to worry about timestamps.
    • If you choose to download a transcript with the timestamp included, you could use a web-based tool like Subtitle Tools to remove them.
  • If you subscribe to a Panopto course folder with an RSS feed (instructions here), then you will have access to your mp4’s for your videos right from your desktop as they are uploaded to Panopto. You can do this using iTunes on either a Mac or PC, no Apple or iTunes account required. It makes it really convenient to access videos on your desktop without having to download each video to your desktop from Panopto first.
  • Add captions to Panopto using the Premiere SRT file.
  • See Adobe’s documentation for captioning in Premiere for more additional information.