Create Captions and Subtitles in Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Captions and subtitles are important for making your videos accessible to a wider audience. They help viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, people watching in noisy environments, non-native speakers, and anyone scrolling social media with the sound off. Beyond accessibility, captions can also improve your video’s SEO since search engines can index the text.

Today we are going to go over how to manually create captions and subtitles in Adobe Premiere Pro CC. If you want the automatic AI-powered approach instead, check out how to automatically create captions in Premiere Pro.

How to Create Captions in Premiere Pro

Setting Up the Caption Track

1. Go to File > New > Captions. A dialog box will appear with format options.
2. Choose your caption format:
   • CEA-608 is the standard for broadcast TV in North America.
   • CEA-708 is the HD broadcast standard.
   • Open Captions burn the text directly into the video. They are always visible and cannot be turned off by the viewer.
   • For most web content, Open Captions or SRT export is the way to go.
3. Click OK. A captions clip will appear in your Project panel.
4. Drag the captions clip onto the timeline above your footage.

Adding Caption Text

5. Open the Captions panel. If it is not visible, go to Window > Captions.
6. Click on the captions clip in the timeline. In the Captions panel, you will see a text field that says “Type caption text here.”
7. Play your video and listen to the audio. Type the first line of dialogue into the text field.
8. Adjust the font and size at the top of the Captions panel to match your preferred style.

Styling the Captions

9. To remove the default background behind the text, find the opacity control for the background and reduce it to 0. Make sure “Background” is selected in the three-option toggle (Background, Edge, Text).
10. To add a text outline instead (which is more readable on varying backgrounds), switch to “Edge” and increase the Edge width. Set the edge color to black for maximum readability.
11. Use the X and Y position markers to align the caption where you want it on screen. The standard position is bottom center.

Timing the Captions

12. On the timeline, the captions clip has a thin bar at the bottom showing each caption segment. Drag the right edge of this bar to match when that line of dialogue ends.
13. When the next piece of dialogue begins, click the plus button (+) in the Captions panel to add a new caption segment.
14. Type the next line and adjust its timing the same way.
15. Repeat for all the dialogue in your video.

Tips

• Keep captions short. One to two lines per caption is ideal. If you have a long sentence, break it into multiple captions.
• Time them to the audio. Each caption should appear when the speaker starts and disappear when they stop. Captions that linger too long or appear too early feel disjointed.
• Use consistent styling. Pick one font, size, and position and stick with it throughout the video.
• Export as SRT. If you need a subtitle file for YouTube or other platforms, you can export the captions as an SRT file through File > Export > Captions.
• For the faster, AI-powered approach, check out automatic captions in Premiere Pro.

That is how you create captions and subtitles in Premiere Pro. It is a manual process, but it gives you full control over the timing, styling, and content of every caption.