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Pinky Saver

From script to subtitles.

Say goodbye to copy & paste.

Turn your script into captions.
Reuse the timing across languages.

Generate a caption file from your written script, then apply its timing to a translated version.

Try Shorts ↗
29-second example
Excerpt from the sample script.
01

Prepare your script.

Separate your text into blocks. Each block becomes one caption.

BREAKING NEWS_script.docxINPUT
BREAKING NEWS.
Two cats have escaped from the zoo!
Meet Ollie
and Hawk.
One text block → one caption
Download script (.docx) ↓
FULL SCRIPT EXAMPLE
BREAKING NEWS.
Two cats have escaped from the zoo!

Meet Ollie
and Hawk.

Two adorable
Ragdoll cats.

They ran straight
into a local café…

And became
WAITERS! 

The neighbourhood fell in love
with them.

They even started
their own group:

“Neighbourhood
Cat Watch.”

But the zookeepers
want them back!

Will Ollie and Hawk
return to the zoo?

Or stay with
their new family?

Watch tonight
to find out!
02

From text to timed captions.

Upload the script, set the reading speed and start time, then generate an SRT. Review the estimated timing in your edit.

Upload your script, choose your settings, and generate a caption file, then import it into Premiere.
Watch the full demo at full size ↗
03

Create another language version of your video.

Use a translated script and an existing caption file to create captions in another language. Keep the same number of text blocks to reuse the original timing.

ENGLISH / REFERENCE00:00:07,000 → 00:00:10,800

Meet Ollie
and Hawk.

CHINESE / RESYNCED00:00:07,000 → 00:00:10,800

来认识一下奥利
和霍克。

View the remapping step
Apply the reference SRT timing to the translated script.
04 / Back to the edit

Bring both versions into Premiere.

Import the subtitles, check them against the picture, and apply your caption styling.

English and Chinese caption tracks with matching clip boundaries in Premiere.
English and Chinese captions share the same timing.

The finished video uses the first five captions, with the ending adjusted in the edit. The downloads retain all 12 reference captions.

View the full Premiere screenshotPremiere showing the captioned vertical cat video and both subtitle tracks.
Your turn

Try the same example.

Start with the sample files and follow the same workflow.

↓ English script↓ Chinese script↓ Reference SRT
1 hr → 5–10 min

News-package captioning: a manual job becomes a check.

30 min → 5 min

Social and Shorts captioning.

3 languages

Chinese, Cantonese and English — with room to grow.

The tool in use

Select a screenshot to view it in full.

Pinky Saver's package captioning screen: upload slots for script, VO audio, grab audio and Premiere XML, with a Generate button.
Packages — script, audio and Premiere XML in; a Premiere-ready SRT out.
Pinky Saver's Shorts screen: caption script upload with CPS and start-time settings, plus an SRT resync tool.
Shorts — styled captions from a script, plus SRT resync across languages.
01 — The problem

Two pinkies, ten thousand keystrokes

In a multilingual news environment, captioning is essential but punishing. Every news package and social clip needs subtitles that are perfectly timed and word-accurate — and the reference script almost always already exists. So the editor’s real task collapses into one thing: copying text from a script and pasting it onto the timeline, line by line.

It’s slow, repetitive, and physically taxing — the kind of low-value labour that quietly builds toward RSI. Cross-language content is harder still: when the script is a translation, it can never be matched directly against the original speech, so the timing has to be rebuilt entirely by hand.

02 — The solution

Align the script you already have

Script + audio
XML for cross-language jobsAlign + reviewSRT + QC report

Pinky Saver takes the script the editor already has and does the aligning for them.

  1. It runs ASR (automatic speech recognition) to turn the voice track into text.
  2. It then uses Levenshtein character-level matching to align the authoritative script against that transcript — so the words on screen are always the real script, not the ASR’s best guess.
  3. For cross-language content, where speech and script can’t match, it reads the Premiere XML to locate the exact clip each soundbite sits in, then distributes the translated lines across that window by character count.
  4. It outputs a QC report and a Premiere-ready SRT file, ready to drop straight into the edit.

The whole workflow is: upload the script (plus the voice track and XML for cross-language jobs), click Generate, and within 2–3 minutes the caption file downloads locally. It began as a command-line tool and was rebuilt into a web platform so it’s usable by anyone, not just people comfortable in a terminal.

A key design decision

Once the ASR models are downloaded, Pinky Saver runs fully offline — no incoming or outgoing network traffic, and no audio, script, or footage ever leaves the organisation. For a newsroom handling sensitive material, that privacy guarantee matters as much as the speed.

03 — The impact

An hour’s work becomes a check

~99% Accuracy on same-language captions.
~80% Accuracy on translated content that previously had to be timed entirely by hand.
1 hr → 5–10 min News-package captioning: a manual job becomes a check.
30 min → 5 min Social and Shorts captioning.
up to 90% Of the copy-and-paste labour removed from the captioning workflow.
3 languages Chinese, Cantonese and English — with room to grow.

Built for and in daily use by the SBS Chinese-language team, and now rolling out company-wide.

It also ships with a dedicated Shorts module (script in, styled captions out, following the in-house caption style guide) and a caption-remapping function that maps an existing SRT’s timecodes onto a script in another language. It currently supports Chinese, Cantonese and English, with an architecture built to extend to Arabic, Korean, Vietnamese and beyond.