Any documentary editors?… transcription question

[Frank Pledge]

never heard of it. doesn’t feel like it would work so well if there was one as interview subjects don’t often think about diction too much. it would seem there would be e ton of errors.

i assume you know that there are transcription services and it is beyond your time and or budget?

fp

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

Its not software, its called a “Starving College Student” who can type.

[Ben Oliver]

first off, never trust college students. i needed transcripts done, i had 10 college students try and do it, and none of them got more than 10 minutes into a tape.

the best thing to do is to make mp3 files of the audio, capture it in fcp, and then export the audio. the timecodes should match well enough to your file, so that if you add like, 10 second handles, you’ll be fine.

then open up a text program, like word, and listen to the mp3, then type, and keep doing that…….

im a pretty good typer (i dont do transcriptions for my own docs, i do transcriptions to make extra cash) I can do about a 1 hour tape in an 8 hour day!

its tedious, but is doable.

[Dave Kulawick]

There are a number of tools that try to do this, any speech-to-text tool is doing that anyway. I’ve heard from people who’ve tried to use these tools in an automated CC generator, or in an effort to index content for searching and the 85% accuracy that can be achieved is “not good enough”.

A more interesting way of searching audio was described to me by someone from Autocue…..you take a sample of the word your looking for and have the tool search the recorded waveform for other instances of that waveform! F-ing cool idea, I thought. particularly as you wouldn’t need to create an index [transcription] of the audio for this to work.

I do not know whether this is in-the-pipe or a shipping product.

—
Dave Kulawick
Instructional Media
Carleton University

[Dave Kulawick]

Ooops. It is Autocue, the product is QLog.

—
Dave Kulawick
Instructional Media
Carleton University

[Ric Christoferson]

Dragon Speech recognition software… search google..

it works

[Dave Mac]

Mike,

A couple of suggestions….

(1) Most good computer “transcription” software (you talk and the computer converts it to text) require the user to train the software to recognize your voice. So, unless you were to train the software with the actual people appearing in the film, you would have to repeat the dialog yourself after training the software (still faster than typing?).

I believe that the only current option for voice to computer text transcription for the Mac OS is iListen from MacSpeech. This kind of software requires consistent audio levels and a very good signal-to-noise ratio to work well.

(2) If you have the budget, you may want to check into hiring a transcription service or a “court recorder” (can’t think of the proper term). With fairly clear and understandable recordings, they could transcribe an audio tape with almost 100% accuracy on the first listening….

-Dave

[Ben Oliver]

just whatever you do, do not trust college students. they ahve enough going on, i work at harvard university part time as an editor, and even these kids have screwed me over!!!

[David Smith]

You can’t send anyone’s voice to a program like Macspeech, the program has to be “trained” with a voice reading prescribed text so the software can learn the person’s voice.

When I have the budget I use a transcription service. Otherwise, a good speech to text program is useful. I use Viavoice for Mac by IBM. Macspeech is another choice. The easiest way I’ve found uses two computers. I make an audio file from the tape on my Powerbook, and run Viavoice on my tower. The software came with a usb headset. I have the earpiece plugged into the Powerbook and the mic plugged into the tower. As I listen to the audio file, I repeat the words out loud as I hear them. Done.

It’s really worth the time to create the audio file instead of working from audio or video tape. It is much faster having a non-linear file that you can start and stop with a press of the space bar, as well as jog around with a click on the keypad or a press of the arrow keys. Futzing around with tape is clunky and hell on your playback machine.

One caveat…. it does take some time to get these programs to learn your voice and work properly. Don’t try it when you’re on deadline, you’re bound to get frustrated.

David

[John Burgan]

Nice in theory, but none of the text-to-speech apps really help here.

One shareware app I’ve heard people find useful for transcribing is DittoAV – download link on this page: https://www.overhyped.com/software/index.html

Alternatively, if you do end up farming the work out, https://productiontranscripts.com/ have a good reputation (no affiliation)