Premiere Pro won't import your SRT

"The importer reported a generic error" names nothing, which is why this question has been asked on Adobe's forums for years without a settled answer. In practice it is almost always one of four things, and you can tell which in under a minute.

Check these in order

1. A byte order mark at the start of the file. This is the most common cause and the hardest to see, because a BOM is invisible in every editor that does not deliberately show it.
2. The wrong text encoding, usually ANSI or UTF-16 where UTF-8 was expected. Suspect this first if the transcript contains accents, curly quotes, or any non-Latin script.
3. Malformed cues: a missing blank line between cues, a cue with no text, or timecodes using a full stop instead of a comma.
4. A file that is not really an SRT, most often a WebVTT that was renamed.

The byte order mark

A BOM is three bytes some editors write at the start of a UTF-8 file to mark it as Unicode. It is invisible. When Premiere reads the file, the first cue number is not "1" but an invisible character followed by "1", which is not a number, so the parse fails on line one and the whole file is rejected.

Notepad on Windows adds one by default with "UTF-8". Saving as "UTF-8 without BOM" fixes it. In VS Code the encoding is in the status bar; choose "Save with Encoding" → "UTF-8" rather than "UTF-8 with BOM".

Encoding

If your captions are English and plain, encoding is rarely the problem. If they contain accented characters, curly quotation marks, em dashes, or any non-Latin script, it often is. The symptom short of a hard failure is mojibake: characters rendered as question marks or as pairs like é where an é should be.

Re-save as UTF-8 without a BOM. Premiere handles UTF-8 fine; it is the alternatives it struggles with.

Malformed cues

SRT is strict about its blank lines: exactly one blank line separates cues, and the structure is a number, a timing line, then the text. A cue whose text is empty, or two cues run together with no blank line, will stop the import. Hand-edited files and files produced by scripts are where this shows up.

Timecodes use a comma before the milliseconds: 00:00:01,000. A full stop there is WebVTT's convention, and a file mixing the two is a renamed .vtt.

The quickest fix

Run the file through the SRT to VTT converter and back, or straight into whichever format you actually need. It reads the file forgivingly (stripping a BOM, normalising line endings, ignoring cue numbering) and writes a clean one. If it reports no cues found, the file is not an SRT at all, which is itself the answer.

If you are heading into Premiere anyway, converting to marker XML skips the caption importer entirely and puts the transcript in the Markers panel instead.

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