How to Make Animated Captions in Premiere Pro

What animated captions look like

These are the animated caption styles in CaptionX for Premiere Pro. Bold Pop highlights each word as it's spoken; the others pop in a few words at a time.

Method 1: animate Premiere Pro's captions by hand

Free, and built into Premiere Pro, but every caption is animated one at a time.

1. 1

   Create the captions. Open Window › Text, transcribe the sequence, then choose Create captions. Premiere Pro puts them on a caption track.

2. 2

   Style them. Select the captions and set the font, size, color and background in the Properties panel. Save the look so you can reuse it on other captions.

3. 3

   Upgrade them to graphics. Select the caption clips, then choose Graphics › Upgrade Caption to Graphic. Each caption becomes a graphic clip you can animate.

4. 4

   Animate them. Select a graphic clip and add keyframes for Position, Scale or Opacity in Effect Controls, for example a quick scale-up as each line appears. Repeat for every caption.

The catch: a two-minute video can have dozens of captions, and each one is animated on its own. A word-by-word effect means splitting every line into single words first.

Method 2: animated caption styles with CaptionX

CaptionX is our Premiere Pro extension. It transcribes your sequence in 100 languages and puts the captions on your timeline in the style you pick, already timed to the speech, and you can still edit them.

1. 1

   Install CaptionX, then open Premiere Pro and go to Window › Extensions › CaptionX.

2. 2

   Pick a caption style.

3. 3

   Generate the captions. They land on your timeline, animated and in sync.

The styles:

• Bold Pop: word by word. The word being spoken gets a highlight box in any color you choose, gradients included, and you can change the font.
• Shorts: chunky outlined words in white, cyan, green, red or magenta.
• Fire, Cinematic, Street Bold, Clean Minimal, Casual and Bold Outline: each with its own look, popping in a few words at a time.

CaptionX has a free plan, with a Pro subscription for unlimited use.

Caption presets and templates

“Caption presets” can mean three different things in Premiere Pro:

• Your own saved styles. Style one caption, save the look, and apply it to the rest. This changes how captions look, not how they move.
• Motion Graphics templates. Template packs give you designed caption animations that you drag onto the timeline and fill with your own text.
• Caption styles in a plugin. In CaptionX the style is applied while the captions are generated, so every word is already timed to the speech.

Questions

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