Three ways to caption a video in Premiere Pro, from fully manual to fully automatic — including what to do if your project isn't in one of Adobe's ~16 supported languages.
Window → Text, then go to the Transcript tab.
Click "Transcribe Sequence" — Adobe processes the audio and generates a transcript.
From the transcript, click "Create Captions" to generate a caption track on your timeline.
Works well for English, Spanish, French, German, and Adobe's other supported languages. If your spoken language isn't on that list, this won't work — skip to Option 3.
Window → Text → New Caption Track, then type out each caption by hand, setting in/out points manually. Works for any language, but is slow — typically 3 to 5 hours per hour of footage.
A Premiere Pro extension — drag-and-drop install, no Terminal required.
Pick the spoken language or leave it on auto-detect.
CaptionLab transcribes locally using OpenAI's Whisper model and produces a word-level accurate SRT.
The SRT imports straight into your Premiere project as an editable caption track.
Covers all 99 languages Whisper supports — including Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Indonesian, and dozens more that Adobe's built-in tool doesn't offer. Runs fully offline, one-time $39.
| Situation | Best option |
|---|---|
| English/Spanish/French project, have Creative Cloud | Adobe's built-in Speech to Text |
| Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, or 90+ other languages | CaptionLab |
| Client footage under NDA | CaptionLab (fully offline) |
| One 30-second clip, any language | Manual captioning is fine |
One-time $39. Works offline. 14-day money-back guarantee.
Get CaptionLab →