Adobe Premiere 14.0.2 and Transcriptive: What You Need to Know

Adobe has slipped in a pretty huge change into 14.0.2 and it seriously affects Transcriptive, the A.I. transcript plugin for Premiere. I’ll get into the details in a moment, but let me get into the important stuff right off the bat:

  • If you are using Premiere 14.0.2 (the latest release)
    • And own Transcriptive 2.0…
    • And own Transcriptive 1.x…
      • You can upgrade to Transcriptive 2.x
      • Or you must turn ‘NewWorld’ off (instructions are below)
      • Or keep using Premiere Pro 14.0.1

For the most part Transcriptive is written in Javascript. This relies on Premiere’s ability to process and run that code. In Premiere 14.0.2, Adobe has quietly replaced the very old Extendscript interpreter with a more modern Javascript engine (It’s called ‘NewWorld’ in Adobe parlance and you can read more about it and some of the tech-y details on the Adobe Developer Blog). On the whole, this is a good thing.

However, for any plugin using Javascript, it’s a big, big deal. And, unfortunately, it’s a big, big deal for Transcriptive. It completely breaks old versions of Transcriptive.

If you’re running Transcriptive 2.x, no problem… we just released v2.0.3 which should work fine with both old and new Javascript Interpreter/engine.

If you’re using Transcriptive 1.x, it’s still not exactly a problem but does require some hoop jumping. (and eventually ‘Old World’ will not be supported in Premiere and you’ll be forced to upgrade TS. That’s a ways off, though.)

Turning Off New World

Here are the steps to turn off ‘NewWorld’ and have Premiere revert back to using ‘Old World’:

  • Press Control + F12 or Command + F12. This will bring up Premiere’s Console.
  • From the Hamburger menu (three lines next to the word ‘Console’), select Debug Database View
  • Scroll down to ScriptLayerPPro.EnableNewWorld and uncheck the box (setting it to False).
  • Restart Premiere Pro

When Premiere restarts, NewWorld will be off and Transcriptive 1.x should work normally.

Screenshot of Premiere's Debug console
So far there are no new major bugs and relatively few minor ones that we’re aware of when using Transcriptive 2.0.3 with Premiere 14.0.2 (with NewWorld=On). There are also a LOT of other improvements in 2.0.3 that have nothing to do with this.

Adobe actually gave us a pretty good heads up on this. Of course, in true Anarchist fashion, we tested it early on (and things were fine) and then we tested it last week and things were not fine. So it’s been an interesting week and a half scrambling to make sure everything was working by the time Adobe sent 14.0.2 out into the world.

So everything seems to be working well at this point. And if they aren’t, you now know how to turn off all the new fangled stuff until we get our shit together! (but we do actually think things are in good shape)

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