How To Add Subtitles In Premiere Pro: Step-by-Step Guide

June 2023

By adding subtitles to your videos, you can profoundly enhance audience engagement, particularly when presenting in a language other than their native dialog. Adobe Premiere Pro offers clever and easy options for this. We've put together a step-by-step guide to help enable you in adding subtitles to your videos with Premiere Pro – increasing accessibility and widening your audience reach. Our guide equips you with the skills to produce captivating video content, regardless of your experience with video editing.

What Is The Importance Of Having Subtitles?

Digital media has made video content ubiquitous, serving entertainment, education, and marketing with attention-catching visuals and thought-provoking messages. However, subtitles prove crucial for unhindered comprehension and accessibility, especially for the hearing-impaired or those in sound-sensitive environments. Here are a few reasons why having subtitles is valuable:

Accessibility: Subtitles make your content accessible to a wider audience, including people with hearing difficulties or language barriers. By adding subtitles, you can ensure that everyone can follow along with your message.
SEO: Subtitles in videos improve SEO. Search engines like Google can't watch videos but they can read subtitles. Adding them automatically provides more content information and transcript, leading to better visibility in search results. As a result, people searching for your content can easily find it.
Engagement: Subtitles can also improve the engagement of your video content. Some people may prefer to watch videos without sound, while others may be in a noisy environment where they can't hear the audio. By adding a text panel, you can keep your audience engaged with your content even in these situations.

How To Add Subtitles In Premiere Pro

Understanding the significance of subtitles is just the starting point. This guide delves into a simple approach for adding subtitles in Adobe Premiere Pro. It's all about selecting the right words and structure to maintain clarity, coherency, transcription, and reader engagement. Follow these simple steps to create compelling captions for your video content.

To import a video file into Adobe Premiere Pro, open the software and head to the "File" tab at the top. From here, click on "Import" and select your desired video file. From there, you can select your video file and easily bring it into your project panel. Select your video file from your computer and click Open.
Create a new caption file: To create a new caption file, go to File > New item > Captions. Select the appropriate caption format for your video (e.g. CEA-608 for broadcast TV or CEA-708 for closed captioning) and click OK.
Add captions to your video: With the new caption track file open, click on the first caption field and type in your subtitle text. You can also adjust the timing of the subtitle by dragging the caption field to the appropriate timecode in the timeline. Repeat this process for all the subtitles in your video program monitor.
Once you've added subtitles to your video, it's time to export it. Be sure to include your subtitles so that your message is conveyed unmistakably. Go to File > Export > Media and select your export settings. Under the Captions tab, select Include Captions and choose your caption format. Click Export to save your video with subtitles.

How Do I Edit Subtitles In Premiere Pro?

Captioning your videos is imperative in making your content more accessible to a larger audience. Adobe Premiere Pro offers a range of tools to help you edit subtitles with ease. Follow the steps below to add or edit subtitles in Premiere Pro:

Create a new caption file: To create a new caption file, go to File > New > Captions. Choose the appropriate settings like the video standard, caption standard, and caption display format. Click "OK" after you have made your selections.
Import your caption file: Import your caption file by going to File > Import, and selecting the file you created in step 1. Make sure the file is in the correct format and matches your video.
Add captions to your timeline: Drag your caption file to your timeline and place it on a new track above your video. This will display your captions on the video as per the timing you've set in the caption file.
Edit your captions: To edit your captions, select the caption track in the timeline and open the Caption Panel. Easily tweak your captions here by modifying the text, font, size, color and position.
Export your video with captions: Once you're happy with your captions, export your video with the captions embedded. Choose the format for your video export by selecting your preferred option in the Export Settings window. Under the Captions tab, choose your caption format, and make sure to check the "Include Captions" box before exporting your video workflow.

Conclusion

In conclusion, adding subtitles to your videos is a simple process with Adobe Premiere Pro. By following the steps outlined above, you can easily create and edit captions to make your content more accessible to a wider audience. Remember to choose when creating your caption file, import it correctly, place it on a separate track, and adjust the timing as necessary. Editing your captions is a breeze with the Caption Panel, where you can modify the font, size, color, and position of your text. Lastly, it's crucial to export your video with the captions included so that your message is conveyed unmistakably. With these steps, you can easily add subtitles to your videos and make your content more accessible to everyone.

Final Thoughts

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