Premiere Pro’s New Auto-Transcribe is AWESOME!
The engineering team for Adobe Premiere Pro not only revamped their subtitles/captions process to make it better. They added something no other NLE (non-linear editor) application has: auto-transcription.
What is that? Say your project is a scene with dialog or an interview. Something with dialog. You simply go to the Captions workspace, and in the Text panel, select “Transcribe Sequence”. It uploads the soundtrack to an automatic service to create written text from speech. You get a time-passing bar. And then the transcription simply appears in that panel.
You can edit the transcription, right in that panel. Or if you’d rather edit the captions in place on the timeline, tell it to “Create Captions”. And Premiere Pro creates a captions/subtitle track above the normal video tracks on the timeline, and places your subtitles or captions there for you.
A Speed Demon on Steroids!
It is quick and easy. It does a pretty good job. But you will need to do some editing. And it does take a bit of practice to figure out why it works the way it does, How to give a style or feel to the results.
I needed to test the new process thoroughly. And of course, to get comfortable with it. Get my speed up. So I went back to a few old abandoned interview projects in our archives. Projects that never got done. I had enough media there for some good practicing and pushing.
Why didn’t those projects get done? They were interview jobs. Projects that were well intentioned. But we realized they were going to take a lot of editing time. And organizational time. All editing choices needed to be based on the words being spoken. We would have to sit and watch all the clips. Make subclips. Drag/drop from a rough-cut to selects sequences.
Re-listen to the text. Adjust. Trim or add. Rearrange the clips. Very fussy time-stealing work.
But the projects weren’t really important enough to justify the time they would need to finish. And they were sent to the Archives to die. Or perhaps, go into stasis.
But I brought some of those old project media clips back into new projects in my 2021 Productions. And got to work. This is what the Captions Workspace Text panel looks like with the sequence already transcribed.
As you can see, the text is shown as blocks of words with formatting available. Double-click a block to edit it. Any changes you make are simultaneously made in the blocks on the timeline.
The Captions Workspace
This is Captions Workspace. The Text panel is in the upper left panel group, the subtitles show as the yellow blocks above the timeline. And the controls for stylizing are on the right. And they are nearly the same as used in the Essential Graphics workspace and panel.
The yellow blocks above the timeline are the captions blocks. They show the text on them if the timeline is expanded enough. You can select a block and physically move it. You can use edit tools to lengthen or shorten a block.
If the cursor shows the red bar with double-facing arrows, you move that edit point. It will either leave a gap to the right or over-write into the next space.
If the cursor shows the yellow bar with one-sided arrows you are moving that edit point and all blocks past that.
And you can use the formatting tools on the far right to position your text on screen. Set font type and color. Add strokes. Shadows. And of course save as a preset that can be selected for a current timeline or for a new sequence.
Here’s a link to our Creativity-Hive Facebook page, to a stream where I demonstrated this process to Miriam …
Creativity-Hive: Speed to Text Transcription in Premiere Pro
The Day the Universe Changed
Well now … this is The Day the Universe Changed! That’s a title from a TV show that our family used to love. With a fascinating narrator who went through various events and ideas, showing how those ideas, those events, changed the human universe.
Some seemingly very small things led to massive changes in how we humans live. And it is a very appropriate phrase for what this auto-transcribe has meant for my business. My passion.
I had been “merely” grateful the Adobe DVA team was working on a new captions process. The old one was horrible and I didn’t even want to work with it. But I didn’t expect this much benefit. This much sheer joy of the new tools.
And suddenly, those old projects, just brought back to test this new subtitles process, have been given new life. They were a drudgery to work on. But now, they’re a joy. Easy. Obvious. Direct choices can be made in moments. This makes editing interviews and dialog a total breeze. Slick.
We’re back at work on several long-archived projects. Because now they are easy and a joy to do!
And I’ve discovered the new captions/subtitles process is by far the most massive change and improvement to my editing and video-post processing workflow.
EVER.
My video-post “universe” truly has changed. And here’s a link to Adobe’s “Help” system explaining the new process.
Very cool article. I am glad they updated it. Of course the update happen after a 40 minute non-profit fundraiser video we did in June. We came close to the deadline as the client kept making changes up to the day before the event. We relied on Youtube to transcribe and add captions for us for speed. It still over 24 hours for Youtube to auto generate them and we were editing them for correctness the day of the event. I am glad these can be made so much easier now. Thanks Neil.
Exactly!
Thanks so much!