Hey Product Hunt
Tomorrow we're launching CaptionLab, and wanted to give this community a heads-up first.
Adobe Premiere Pro's built-in Speech-to-Text covers about 16 languages. If you edit in Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, or dozens of others you don't exist to it. So editors type subtitles by hand for hours, or upload footage to a cloud tool and pay a subscription forever, hoping nobody minds their client's NDA'd project sitting on a stranger's server.
I got tired of both, so I built CaptionLab: a real plugin that lives right inside Premiere. Select a clip, hit Generate, and subtitles land on your timeline in under a minute powered by OpenAI's Whisper, running 100% locally. No cloud, no API keys, no monthly bill.
What inspired you to build this?
I edit video in Ukrainian, and Adobe's own Speech-to-Text simply doesn't support it — it covers 16 languages, and mine isn't one of them. Every time I needed subtitles, I was stuck either typing them by hand or uploading footage to some website and paying a monthly fee just to get a transcript.
What problem were you trying to solve?
Two problems, really. First, the language gap — Adobe ignores dozens of languages that have millions of speakers (Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, and more). Second, the "upload your footage to our cloud" model that most subtitle tools use — that's a non-starter for anyone editing client work under NDA, and it turns into a forever-subscription.
So I built CaptionLab: a real plugin that lives inside Premiere Pro itself, runs OpenAI's Whisper model locally on your Mac or Windows PC, and never sends your footage anywhere. Select a clip, hit Generate, captions land on your timeline in under a minute — completely offline.
How did your approach evolve while working on this?
I originally planned this as a simple wrapper around Whisper, but the real work turned out to be making it feel native — not a browser tab, not a separate app you tab out to. Getting it to run entirely inside Premiere's CEP panel, offline, with zero setup friction (no Python install, no Terminal, no API keys) took much longer than the transcription part itself. That "it just works inside the app you're already using" feeling became the whole point of the product, more than the 99-language count ended up being.
Would genuinely love feedback, especially from anyone editing in a language Adobe still doesn't support — that's exactly who this is for.
Offline subtitles at this price point are honestly a no-brainer for editors who care about client footage security. One thing that would push me to grab it immediately is a batch export option for multiple sequences at once, so I can subtitle an entire series without babysitting the panel for every cut.
@zkanhactahmw6g Thanks, Özkan! Really appreciate that — client footage security is one of the big pain points we built this around.
Batch export across multiple sequences is a great call, especially for series work.
Right now CaptionLab handles one sequence (or full timeline) at a time,
but queuing up several in one go is a really natural next step — noting it down for the roadmap.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback — feel free to reach out anytime if you end up trying it out.
I'm a producer at a Ukrainian production company and we just tried CaptionLab. Honestly, it already feels like a lifesaver! We add subtitles to pretty much everything we make, and Adobe not having a Ukrainian option was such a pain. We also can't use online tools for our projects, so up until now we literally had someone on the team transcribing videos by hand, then editors would add the subs manually. Not fun:))
This tool does the whole thing right inside Adobe, and it's fast. The whole editing team is already on board. Highly recommend!❤️🔥
@olga_mykhalets This means so much to hear — thank you, Olga! 🇺🇦❤️🔥
You just described exactly why I built this: Adobe skipping Ukrainian felt absurd given how many teams need it, and manual transcription + manual subbing is brutal at scale.
Genuinely glad it's saving your team that pain.
Thanks for trying it out and for the recommendation — means a lot from a fellow Ukrainian team!