With WCAG 2.0 guidelines becoming more common I find I'm doing more and more captions these days (well, okay, doing captions at all). With the help of older forum posts from other members here and some trial and error I've found a workflow that works well for us that I thought I'd share here. Please feel free to critique and correct if anyone can improve the workflow. Thanks to the Adobe Premiere development team for adding CC functionality into the latest version - it's a pretty mature first attempt and a huge timesaver!
- Transcribe the video into a text editor *
- Add a captions track in Premiere and copy and paste the transcribe as per the necessary timing. Using the audio waveform is a huge help
- Export using the following settings: MP4 format or similar, video turned off, audio turned on, Create Caption sidecar file as a EBU N19 Subtile File (.stl) at the appropriate frame rate
- Import the XML on a PC using the brilliant (and free!) Subtlte Edit (http://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit). Swap the format to WebVTT (.vtt) in the toolbar dropdown and save as a .VTT file **
- Import the VTT file into Youtube or Vimeo.. check and publish!
* Step 1 can be done in Premiere but I find it easier to play in QT and transcribe in TextEdit using the Play/Pause keyboard controls
** VTT works very happily with both Youtube and Vimeo with all the translations intact
Anyone approach captioning differently? Have any luck with different formats, etc? Our outputs are strictly for web, so we don't really use commands to identify different speakers, italics for SFX, etc. Not sure if these affect the workflow described above.