Your Premiere transcript fails with "File is not valid JSON"
“File is not valid JSON. Export a Premiere static transcript (.prtranscript).”
What is actually wrong
Premiere has shipped two static transcript formats. Older builds wrote JSON; current builds write .prtranscript, a binary FlatBuffers file. When a binary .prtranscript arrives on a page expecting JSON, or a JSON file was renamed to .prtranscript, the parser sees bytes that are not JSON and stops. The fix is to give the file to the converter that reads binary transcripts.
Fix it here: Premiere transcript to SRT
Drop the file. It is detected and converted in your browser; nothing is uploaded. Free to start, no signup.
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Conversions …
Drop EDL, SRT, VTT, .prtranscript, or transcript files
Any caption, transcript or timeline file: CutConvert picks the converter and shows what survives · up to 100 KB per file
The fix, step by step
Open the file in a text editor
If it starts with a brace it is JSON. If it is mostly unreadable bytes with occasional words, it is the binary .prtranscript. Both are handled; the page just needs the right one.
Drop the file into the Premiere transcript converter
It decodes the FlatBuffers structure directly: segments, words, speaker labels and timing. No Premiere installation is involved.
Download SRT, Word or CSV
SRT for subtitles, Word for a review copy with timestamps and speakers, CSV for a spreadsheet of every cue.
Two exports, one extension
Premiere’s Text panel can export a static transcript. In the 2022 and earlier builds that export was JSON: a readable text file with segments, words and speaker names. Since then the export has been a .prtranscript, and the contents changed to a binary FlatBuffers structure that Premiere reads faster but nothing else can open. Adobe kept the transcript workflow name and changed the bytes underneath, which is why so much online advice ("just rename it to .json") stopped working.
You can tell them apart in any text editor. JSON starts with {. The binary file starts with a few control bytes, then long runs of unreadable data broken up by the occasional English word from the transcript.
Why renaming fails
A file name is a label. Renaming .prtranscript to .json changes what a file dialog will accept, not what a JSON parser finds inside. The parser reads the first byte, expects { or [, gets something else, and reports exactly the message at the top of this page. The reverse mistake, renaming a JSON export to .prtranscript, fails in Premiere for the same reason.
What the binary converter reads
The Premiere transcript converter on this site decodes the FlatBuffers layout directly: the segment list, the per-word timing in each segment, the speaker label attached to each segment, and the language. From that it writes:
- SRT with cues built from the segments, speaker names as a prefix, and millisecond timing.
- Word (.docx) as a transcript document with timestamps and speaker turns, the format a producer or a translator wants.
- CSV with one row per cue, ready for a spreadsheet.
Word-level timing does not fit in SRT and is grouped into cues; CSV keeps the segment timing exactly.
Corrected transcripts and the greyed-out import
If you are here because Premiere greyed out "Import transcript" for a corrected file, that is the other direction: getting text back into Premiere. The guides on importing a corrected transcript cover it, and the Word to Premiere JSON converter writes the JSON form that import accepts.
Runs locally
The binary is decoded in your browser. The transcript, often the most sensitive file in an interview project, never leaves your machine.
FAQ
- Is .prtranscript really not JSON?
- Current Premiere builds write a binary FlatBuffers file. Older builds wrote JSON under a different export. The converter reads both.
- Can I convert it without Premiere installed?
- Yes. The converter decodes the file directly. It is the only working converter for the binary format that we know of.
- Do speaker names come through?
- Yes. Each segment’s speaker label is kept: as a prefix in SRT, as a speaker turn in Word, and as a column in CSV.