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Can I use InqScribe with Premiere?

← Subtitles & Exporting

Yes!  You can export InqScribe transcripts as SubRip (.srt) files and import them as Captions into Premiere Pro CC.

Here's how:

  1. Start InqScribe
  2. Open your InqScribe transcript
  3. Wrap your lines with in and out points, e.g.
    [00:00:12.27]
Using Inqscribe couldn't be simpler.
[00:00:14.00]
  4. When your transcript is ready to export, select "File->Export->Subrip"
  5. Click on the "Advanced" button.
  6. Make sure you select Text Encoding to "Unicode (UTF-8)".
  7. Make sure Line Endings is set to "Windows (CR/LF)" -- Even if you're on a Macintosh, Premiere will only accept .srt files with Windows line endings.  
  8. Click "OK".
  9. Then set the file name and click on "Export".
  10. Start Premiere and open your project.
  11. In Premiere, select "File->Import" and select your .srt file.

Your captions should be inserted into your Premiere project.  Please refer to your Premiere documentation for enabling Captions for your project and editing individual captions formatting.

If you see a "header error" while importing your subtitles, please check the Line Endings and Text Encoding settings during the export from InqScribe.  Most likely you had the file set to UTF-16 or a Macintosh (CR) line ending.

NOTE: We've heard reports that Premiere enforces a ~250 character limit per line. A subtitle can exceed this limit, but you need to make a new line with a carriage return every 250 characters (in other words, break up the subtitle into <250 character per line chunks). If Premiere encounters a line that's too long, it will stop importing the remaining subtitles.

Older Versions of Premiere

If you have an older version of Premiere, there are a few workarounds however that can help you use Premiere with InqScribe:

1. Use Encore

You can import transcript data relatively easily into Encore (shipped free as part of Adobe Premiere Pro).  It involves exporting the transcript to a tab-delimited format and then doing a simple edit inserting a number and a tab at the front of each line.

Here's what the workflow might look like

  1. Start InqScribe
  2. Open your InqScribe transcript
  3. Make sure your data format is: 
    [in timecode] Sentence 1
[in timecode] Sentence 2
    or 
    [in timecode] [out timecode] Sentence 1
[in timecode] [out timecode] Sentence 2
  4. Export the file as tab delimited.
  5. Open the file in a text editor.
  6. Insert a numeric ID followed by a tab in front of each line, like this (e.g. we've typed in a "1" at the beginning of line 1, a "2" at the beginning of line 2, etc.):
  7. 1 [in timecode] [out timecode] Sentence 1
2 [in timecode] [out timecode] Sentence 2
  8. Save the text file.
  9. Import the text file into Encore as a Subtitle text script. (In Encore CS6: Timeline->Import Subtitles->Text Script...)

For more information, this article by Adobe explains the use of subtitle script files in Encore.


2. Use SugarFX Subtitles

You can use SugarFX Subtitles to permanently burn in subtitles to your final clip.  SugarFX Subtitles can read .srt files, which is supported by InqScribe as an export format.

The workflow looks something like this:

  1. In InqScribe, create your transcript.
  2. In InqScribe, export the transcript to a .srt file.
  3. In Premiere, create your final clip.
  4. In Premiere use the SugarFX Subtitles plugin to import the .srt file and burn it into your clip.

You can get SugarFX Subtitles here: http://sugarfx.tv/info/subtitles_SUGARfx.html


If you have other workflows that can work, we'd love to hear about them!

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