AUTO-CAPTION/SUBTITLE with Descript & Premiere Pro!

It’s here!

The day tech, AI, creativity and vision have come together.

For those of us that create video with captions/subtitles as a permanent feature on every video we do, we have been waiting for the day that being able automatically add them would arrive.

And now, it’s here!

Descript.

This is only possible due to a piece of software called Descript.

Descript started off a few years ago with podcasters, transcribers and audio recordings in mind but it has come a long way in a short space of time. And we are going to use its powerful AI techniques for our own gain.

Descript has the power to take any piece of audio or video with audio attached and identify the words, the grammar, the punctuation and even the different speakers in any given audio track you present it. It will then transcribe it for you in an incredibly short amount of time and present to you a text document of that transcription.

It gets better.

You can then go and use the text editor in the software to edit not only the text it’s created but even the audio you first gave it. Remove a sentence you don’t like from the text and it’s gone from the audio too!

---

DISCLAIMER: This post may contain affiliate links. We make a small commission if you buy the products from these links (at no extra cost to you). As a Descript Affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases. But we only recommend products we would use ourselves. For more information, click here to see our disclosures.

---

How Do We Use This to Our Advantage?

Ok, well let’s get stuck in and we’ll show you.

The first thing to do is download Descript from here , install it and create a free account. The free account will give you 3 hours worth of transcription. For $12 a month you get 12 hours of transcription and $24 a month will give you 30 hours.

You need to have your finished video (without subtitles) in an exported version, an mp4 will do. Create a new project in Descript and upload the video to it.

Let Descript do its thing and in a few minutes you’ll have your fully transcribed video presented to you in a text document.

 

 

 

Once you have this you need to go to where it says ‘Media Editor’ and change it to the ‘Text Editor’. We’re going to use the text editor to refine the transcription before we export it back to Premiere. Descript’s AI is good but it’s not 100% accurate just yet. So go through and ensure your text is correct.

Now head to the ‘Export’ button and click on the ‘Subtitles/Captions’ option. We don’t want the NLE timeline export functions here. We purely want a .srt file instead.

Save the .srt file somewhere next to your media where you’ll be able to find it again.

Premiere Pro.

Now it’s time to head on back to Premiere and change just a couple of things to ensure we have perfect subtitles every time.

Go up to ‘Window’ and click on the ‘Captions’ panel tick box to enable that panel in your workspace.

Now got to the Captions panel and click ‘Import Settings’ on the lower lefthand side. This will open up a dialog box.

This dialog box is where we are going to save even more time because it will allow us to set the look of our captions for every time we use this method.

Go ahead and play around with some style in this dialog box by changing settings and then creating some captions.

The Magic Bit.

Now for the part where it all falls in to place.

Grab that .srt file from your file browser and drag on top of your timeline.

Et voila! Your captions will appear on your video, in the style you prefer and with all of your fully automated text from Descript there and in the correct place as your speaker says each word. Amazing!

If a word falls on a line that you don’t like you can simply click that part of the caption and change it in the captions panel.

Oh, one word of advice, make sure you choose ‘Burn Captions Into Video’ on the export settings under ‘Captions’ otherwise your new captions won’t appear on the final video.

That’s it folks! Just one more way you can work smarter and not harder.

DigiProTips