Premiere Pro CS6 has the ability to turn speech into text and put it into the Speech Analysis metadata. You can still use it in any version of Premiere Pro.

In Premiere CS6 you can right+click on a piece of footage and select ‘Analyze Content’. This would turn all the speech into text. Adobe removed it in later versions of Creative Cloud but all that infrastructure is still in Premiere Pro CC 2018 (and other versions) and this post will tell you how to make use of it with, and without, Transcriptive, our plugin for transcribing video.

First off, if you have Creative Cloud, you still have access to CS6 (or CC). You can download it and use that to turn all your speech to text. This will get saved with your file and when you import it into Premiere 2018, all the text will be in the Speech Analysis field of the Metadata panel. This is very handy as you can use the text with the Source panel to set in and out points and edit with text.

To get older versions of Premiere, go to the Creative Cloud app and find Premiere Pro. Click the menu button (or down arrow) and select ‘Other Versions’. You can install all the way back to CS6.

Once CS6 is installed, you can import the footage, right+click and select ‘Anaylze Content’. It takes some time to do this, but once it’s done, you’ll have all the speech turned into text in Speech Analysis. Import the clips into the version of Premiere you’re using and all that text will show up in the Metadata panel. Voila! It’s not an awesome interface for editing the text (and it needs a lot of editing as it’s not very accurate, which is why Adobe removed it) but it’s there.

Transcriptive can also use that data. If you’re using Transcriptive and drop the footage into a sequence, it’ll pull the text from the Speech Analysis field.

As mentioned, the CS6 speech-to-text isn’t very accurate, which you can see below. So it’s usually worth it to pay a few cents a minute to get a good A.I. transcript or $1.25/min to get human transcripts (which Transcriptive can import).

However, if you want free, then the CS6 trick is one way of doing it. Or you could use YouTube and import their captions into Transcriptive. It’s free, easy and we have a great tutorial that shows you how to get YouTube captions into Premiere!