Hi everyone! Well it may be just because I am in a bad mood because I have a cold, but the changes made to Adobe Premiere Pro to allow for multiple caption tracks went out half baked, in my opinion. I feel like I am running into so many issues with Adobe products recently where I just scratch my head an wonder- why would they do it this way? In my case I am using very little functionality of Premiere Pro. It’s probably overkill for what I do. This time around I had upgraded and I ran through my usual, very, extremely simple creating/editing process. In my mind when you are using a product in the most simple manner you shouldn’t need to sit through an hour-long class before you could use it. But I digress…
UPDATE: you can read through the following if you want to see the sorts of things I tried, but in the end once you get out of Premiere Pro and get back in, the workarounds fail. I ended up going back to v24 . For what I am trying to do the added functionality of multiple captions buys me nothing and costs me lost of time. It’s pretty disappointing to see “fixes” like this go out. Software just isn’t written well anymore. 😒 If you are as frustrated as I am and want to go back to a previous version, you will find out that Premiere Pro doesn’t support previous versions (shocker!) and so once again you have to jump through hoops to get something that should be simple to work. You can follow this link to find out what to do in order to use your project from the current release in a previous one. There is also an automatic converter online here, but I did not find that to work. It might have to do with folder location. By this point I was so sick of this product that I didn’t want to spend another extra nanosecond on it!
Here is my problem, what I tried and ultimately gave up on before going back to the previous version…
Up until the latest release (July 2025) I have simply added my tracks, tweaked them perhaps, and my final steps were to run the Transcribe, Create Captions and Export. The Transcribe Sequence command is under the Text tab (which you may or may not have to show via the Windows dropdown at the top of Premiere Pro. Usually I would need to edit some of the words in the Transcription because Premiere Pro never understands my name or website or a lot of the products I use. I’ve stopped going through and editing “Distress Oxide” because hopefully by now, if you watched my channel at all, you can understand the captions even if some of the product names are wrong 😁. Make sure you double click on the area of the Transcribed Sequence in order to edit so you aren’t typing in command shortcuts by mistake.
When I finish the transcription edit, I click the CC (create captions) button to turn the transcription into matching subtitles/captions. In the past this worked like a champ, and then I went to the Export tab and under the Caption section chose Create Sidecar to have the captions saved as a separate file, and clicked export and I was done. Well, not anymore!
Adobe added the ability to have multiple tracks for captions, apparently to make it easier to handle other languages etc. And it you are burning the captions right into the video then it seems like the process might work a bit better. But if you are like me and only use one caption track and want the Export to default to the default caption track as it did in previous versions, then you are about to be sorely disappointed.
The default for Create Captions is to place the captions in track C2. Now maybe they did this so that they wouldn’t overwrite previous captions if you had some in C1. Fair enough, although I am sure someone could have figured out how to detect that there was nothing in track C1. Ok let’s give them that, but then why would you not, on export, check to see what track has captions in it? And then pick that as the default setting to export as a sidecar file? So, if you can pick up on what is happening based on my rant:
- Add clips to sequence
- Transcribe Sequence
- Create Captions from Transcription (ends up in track C2)
- Export- pick burn under captions section and it utilizes C1 and C2
- Export- pick sidecar under captions section and it utilizes C1 even though there is nothing in C1.
So now every time I go to export I need to remember to choose C2 under the Captions section on the Export tab. If you only make videos every once in a while you will probably forget, and then wonder where your Sidecar file is? Hint: there isn’t one. So now you have to get back in and go through the whole sequence again and choose C2 under the Captions section in the Export tab.
Aha, so I thought I had figured out the work around! I created a Preset- starting with youTube preset and set Sidecar to C2. Made some edits to the project, re-transcribed and created captions, went to Export, and captions were still set to C2. Yay!
Boo! The next time I got back in to create/add/change a project. if the preset was still being utilized, on Export it was back to C1. Unless you pick a different preset and then pick the saved one again. Now it’s back to C2. Sigh.
Finally, if you already have a caption track, and from the transcribe tab- say you added more and had to re-transcribe- when you click CC in order to create captions, a new track, C3 is created. There is no way to indicate to Premiere Pro that I would like to choose/overwrite a caption track. So if you wish to keep using your preset, although at this point I am thinking I should just put a sticky note on my screen that says “Choose C2 on Export” because I’m not sure clicking a different preset and then the new one is any quicker.
And Boo-Hoo! If you exit Premiere Pro and start it up again, the preset work arounds don’t work. Sticky Note it is 😫
And oh BTW since I am ranting already, other things I have noticed in this session (some I’ve definitely noticed before and just rolled my eyes and dealt with it):
- who writes code that has an Undo/Redo function that doesn’t tell you what it is undoing/redoing?
- Have a preset and want to edit it? Good luck with that!
- You can try to change the Export Preset settings and save as a preset using the same name though so you could at least overwrite it. Go ahead and guess what it did-after asking if I wanted to overwrite and I clicked yes. Go ahead, I bet you know what it does. Yep, it creates a new one anyway. Zoink!
This product definitely needs some new engineers. Rant over 😉
