Harcoding subs in Premiere CC 2018 SUCKS, please help

[Ygramul]

I have a feature length MP4 movie with matching SRT subtitles, which I want to burn in. I want nice, white subs with a fairly thick black stroke (important!). Increasing stroke size (called "edge" in Premiere) creates "spikes" and looks awful overall.

Unfortunately, Premiere can only import SRT, MCC, SCC, STL and XML, but not ASS and the like. I'm aware I can easily hardcode ASS in Avidemux, but I want to do other things in Premiere without reencoding.

Can anyone help me out here? It's amazing how a free program can do this, but for a $5799.99 (plus tip) software suite you have to find a workaround.

[cibo]

I would say you have two options:
- Export ASS script to a video with alpha layer using AVisynth/VapourSynth and perform the final blend when you export in Premiere.
- Export ASS script to XML + Images. You can then import your subtitle assets as a timeline and finish in Premiere. The hard task is to format your XML file. If you need libass as a renderer, you can generate BDN XML + PNGs with ass2bdnxml. Then, you will need to do some conversion of BDN XML to whatever XML format works in Premiere (FCPXML, TTML, SMPTE-TT...). If you do not require advanced ASS features, SubtitleEdit may do proper ASS rendering and may allow you to export to a format compatible with Premiere directly.

[Ygramul]

I would say you have two options:
- Export ASS script to a video with alpha layer using AVisynth/VapourSynth and perform the final blend when you export in Premiere.
- Export ASS script to XML + Images. You can then import your subtitle assets as a timeline and finish in Premiere. The hard task is to format your XML file. If you need libass as a renderer, you can generate BDN XML + PNGs with ass2bdnxml. Then, you will need to do some conversion of BDN XML to whatever XML format works in Premiere (FCPXML, TTML, SMPTE-TT...). If you do not require advanced ASS features, SubtitleEdit may do proper ASS rendering and may allow you to export to a format compatible with Premiere directly.

I completely forgot about the export functionality in Subtitle Edit (which is what I use). As far as XML + image is concerned, it can output:

D-Cinema Interop + PNG
D-Cinema SMPTE 2014 + PNG
BDN XML + PNG
Final Cut Pro + PNG (among others)

The last one works (I imported it successfully in Premiere, timecodes are correct) and I think I just need to do some adjustments because they're too tiny.