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.

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.

Frequently asked questions

How accurate is Premiere's built-in Speech to Text?

Solid for clean single-speaker audio, noticeably worse with music, accents, or overlapping speakers. It doesn't run a separate forced-alignment pass, so word-level timing is approximate rather than exact.

Can I import SRT and still use Premiere's caption styling?

Yes. SRT carries no styling by design, so importing it and then applying Premiere's Essential Graphics styling to the track is the normal workflow, not a workaround.

Does Premiere support FCPXML?

No, FCPXML is Final Cut Pro's own interchange format. Premiere reads SRT, which is generated from the same underlying timings and carries the same accuracy.