How to add subtitles in Premiere Pro

Premiere has real built-in transcription now: Speech to Text, running on Adobe Sensei. It's genuinely useful, and it isn't the fastest or most accurate option in every case. Here's the full set of ways to get captions onto a Premiere sequence.

Option 1: Speech to Text

Window → Text, then Transcribe Sequence. Premiere transcribes the audio and generates a caption track you can convert to captions directly from the Text panel. It's convenient because it never leaves the app, and quality varies with audio conditions: accents, cross-talk, and background music all cost it accuracy, and there's no forced-alignment pass to recover word-level precision afterward.

Option 2: manual captions

Captions and Graphics workspace → Captions → New Caption Track → Subtitle. Type each line by hand while scrubbing. Total control over wording and timing, and it doesn't scale past a short clip.

Option 3: import an SRT

File → Import, select the SRT, and it lands in the Project panel as a caption item ready to drop onto a caption track above your sequence. This is where a dedicated transcription pass pays off: word-level timing means splitting or rewriting a line never drifts the rest of the track out of sync, which segment-only transcription can't guarantee.

1. Extract audio from your file (or use it directly if it's already audio-only).
2. Run transcription and forced alignment: every word gets an individual timestamp.
3. Choose word-count or natural-sentence line breaks, and edit any line that reads awkwardly.
4. Export SRT.
5. In Premiere: File → Import, select the SRT, then drag the caption item onto a caption track above your video.

Option 4: import the transcript as sequence markers

A caption track is for the viewer. A marker is for you. Export the transcript as a Premiere marker XML, File → Import it, and every line of the transcript becomes a searchable sequence marker: type a phrase into the Markers panel and Premiere jumps to the frame where it was said. That turns an hour of interview footage into something you can find a soundbite in without scrubbing.

Note that this is a plain .xml file, not FCPXML. Premiere reads an older Final Cut interchange format called xmeml, which is a different document entirely, so a file exported for Final Cut will not import here.

Styling after import

Window → Essential Graphics with the caption track selected gives you font, size, color, background, and position, applied to the whole track at once, regardless of which method put the captions there.

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