Martin Baker
Forum Replies Created
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SpeedScriber is in beta. So if you want to take a look you’d need to sign up at https://www.speedscriber.com
I’m hoping the transcriptions are open to be searchable within the Finder
Not quite sure what you mean. You can print, export as PDF, .srt or plain text.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK -
It depends what you’re looking for Andy.
Trint have gone down the web-app route, which we deliberately didn’t because while it enlarges the customer base it also throws up a ton of major issues. With Trint, if you upload a video file it has to actually upload the WHOLE file including the video (which is not even used!) rather than doing what we’re able to do with SpeedScriber which is to upload just the audio. I can’t tell you how many testers have said how impressed they are with the upload speed due to this reason. Personally I’ve found using Trint hurts my eyes ☺ – one of our testers said their favourite thing about SpeedScriber was how easy the UI design is to look at for hours at a time.
If Trint had round tripping with FCPX (available now in SpeedScriber) and integration with Avid and Premiere Pro (coming soon) then it would be a fair comparison…
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK -
I’ve re-read it all but I remain unconvinced that using favorites for this purpose is a good idea. Works for you and that’s great but it’s just a bit too “hacky” and fraught with potential pitfalls for me. Would like to hear some other voices on this.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK -
Oh my goodness Robin… OK deep breath… I will keep this as short as I can.
1. I totally agree with you that keywords are not a good fit for transcripts. The screenshots I sent to Craig DO use keywords but that was from a previous experiment and the problems are exactly the same when using markers or favorites.
2. I said “it is necessary to view in filmstrip mode” because that’s the ONLY way you can see matching results without having to twirl down every single freaking disclosure triangle. In list view, even if you use your keyboard shortcuts to open all the triangles the bigger problem is that you still can’t see which marker/keyword/favorite it matches. I thought I made that problem very clear in the “step 2” screenshot I sent to Craig which he posted in this thread.
3. I am certainly not suggesting using single words as metadata. It works in Premiere because it has a dedicated speech panel, it won’t work in FCP. Like I said in the original email to Craig, I am suggesting using one marker per sentence.
4. Just because something is transcribed doesn’t follow that it should be a favorite! That’s a weird concept. Let’s take a documentary project as an example. You are clearly going to want to use some lines and not others. So by using favorites for transcripts, you’re stopping editors from manually creating any favorites on clips that have transcripts, because if they do, they will lose the transcript data. I’m not sure I can make the problem with this technique any clearer than that.
5. The bottom line is that FCP only filters CLIPS that contain a search term. It does not filter time-based metadata (markers, keyword ranges, favorites) within clips. This is the problem.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK -
Robin, there’s a couple of problems with this technique.
1. In order to breakout of ‘disclosure triangle hell’, it is necessary to view in filmstrip mode (which is designed for identifying footage visually) but all you can see is the clip name not other textual metadata like the custom favorite name. So if you search for a word “company” in an interview then you have to play through all the results rather than being able to glance down the text and see which one you want.
2. It’s hacking the way that favorites were designed to be used and that makes it too fragile. There’s no overlapping of favorites by design since it’s a binary choice – “is this frame a favorite or not?”. So if we put all the transcript sentences as favorites then you would be unable to use favorites in the normal way because as soon as you do – whooops there go my transcripts for that region!The only workaround I can see is to put all your interview clips into a timeline and then markers CAN be searched in the timeline index and you can matchframe back to the source clip. This is not great (is it possible to have a timeline longer than 24hrs?) and open to human error (“did I remember to add those 40 new source clips to the transcript timeline?”), so I don’t think is really workable.
If anyone wants to see better searching of time-based metadata in FCP, please submit feedback to Apple. The more people that ask for it, the more likely it is to happen.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK -
With good quality audio you can expect 90%+ accuracy but it will vary. To give one example, I had a clip that transcribed to 700 words and only 5 of the words needed correcting. That comes out as 99.3% accurate.
I’m sure many transcription services use automated transcription as a first pass, but it seems strange that they wouldn’t correct all the errors if you’re paying them for accurate transcripts! Although to be fair, I guess this is inevitable if you’re asking a stranger to transcribe footage who doesn’t know any specialist words that you’re very familiar with.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps -
We only said “surprisingly accurate” because you’ll know that automated transcription in the past has been more like “depressingly inaccurate” 🙂
When you get to try it, you can let us know if you’re surprised or not!
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps -
Even though FCP7’s XML format contains a lot of data, it certainly doesn’t contain everything. So I imagine that 7toX needs to open up the source QTs and grab more data in order to do the conversion to FCPX.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps
FinalCutters – For Everything Final Cut Pro -
There’s a preference in DCM to float its window over other apps.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps
FinalCutters – For Everything Final Cut Pro -
The ProRes codec has a setting that flags whether the content is interlaced or progressive. I’m not sure how exactly you did the conversion, but it sounds like the codec was set to interlaced, hence why FCP flags it as “Upper First” when you bring the .mov into FCP.
So as long as you remember to reset it back to “None”, then you’ll be fine in a matching “None” sequence. The worst possible situation would be leaving it as “Upper First” in a “None” sequence – this will cause half the resolution to be thrown away.
MartinDigital Heaven, London UK Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps———-FinalCutters – For Everything Final Cut Pro
