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Karaoke captions in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro's own captions show a whole line at a time and can't highlight the word being spoken. To get karaoke, build it by hand from the transcript's word timings, or let Caption Imp do it from the captions you already made.

Caption Imp, a small blue imp holding a caption bar with one word lit up

The manual way

  1. Make the captions. In the Text panel, Transcribe, then Create captions. Setting the line length to one or two words gets close to word by word, but nothing is highlighted inside a line.
  2. For a real highlight, make one copy of each caption per word. In every copy, colour the word being spoken, or put a box behind it.
  3. Time every copy. Trim each one to the length of its word, using the word timings in the transcript.
  4. Start again when a word changes. The copies don't follow edits to the transcript.

With Caption Imp

  1. Create captions in Premiere as usual and save the project.
  2. Open Window › UXP Plugins › Caption Imp, select the captions or take the whole track, and pick a look.
  3. Click Make karaoke. You get one editable text clip per caption, timed to the words.

It keeps your line breaks, timing and corrected words. Run it again after a change and its clips update in place; Clear removes only its own clips.

It uses the word timings from Premiere's transcript. English captions only for now; there is no SRT import. Ctrl+Z doesn't undo it, so use Clear. Needs Windows 10 or 11 and Premiere Pro 26. More about Caption Imp.

Caption Imp $7.99 a month

7-day free trial first, no card needed. Or every imp in the Imp Pack.

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