[Matt Townley]

We have a client in a highly regulated industry and we have to submit a PDF file with still frames of every “screen” in the videos we create. Depending on the video, this could be a LOT of frames.

I have spent a lot of time looking into this topic and the best solution I have found so far is to use markers and a custom script to export frames from those marker positions.

Here is the script that I run:

This will blast through the process of exporting a still image from every marker on the timeline.

You still have to manually ad the markers, but this is a pretty fast process.

We often have many screens that need to be exported within a single clip, so I haven’t experimented with automating the process of adding markers at every clip change.

[Matt Townley]

Amanda – like Mark said, voice recognition for real time captioning is no where near as good as you might hope. We provide live closed captions for a lot of the conferences and company all hands meetings that we webcast and have never found a voice recognition tool to work well enough. We work with a company called White Coat Captioning who provides real time, remote closed captioning. I’ve worked with them many times and they have always impressed me.

[Matt Townley]

Take a look at CasparCG. It can do everything you are looking for and has various pricing options.

[Matt Townley]

I’m in the Silicon Valley / San Francisco area.

Producing and shooting live events and webcasts has become a big part of our business over the past few years. From a business standpoint it’s great since live events and webcasting projects are generally paid for by different budgets and different clients than our product and brand marketing videos. It’s nice having this diversification of revenue.

[Matt Townley]

Ned – it sounds like you’ve already passed on this project, but I wanted to add my quick thoughts to the thread for future sake, just in case it helps for the next time around or for anyone else.

The folks that mentioned the Teradek Bond were on the right path. This is my go-to solution for completely independent live webcasting. I use the Bond II a lot with 6 LTE modems with great success. As much as I like to own core equipment and technology, I prefer to rent this piece of hardware from a company in your backyard, Atomic Imaging, who was originally referred to me by Teradek when I first sought out a solution to this problem.

I typically give them the address for where I need to stream from, and they use their knowledge and research to help me pick which “blend” of LTE modems from which carriers for that region will work best.

I have used the Bond completely stand alone with only LTE modems and also with LTE modems supplemented by a house-supplied Ethernet or WiFi connection for additional strength or redundancy. This is definitely the way to go in this scenario and it works great. It’s also surprisingly cost effective.

[Matt Townley]

Hey John. I’m in this same boat. Have you found any info?

The Shogun can of course downconvert the 4K to 1080 and feed your monitor, but the Shogun tends to introduce latency so this hasn’t been a great option for me. Better than nothing, but not great.

[Matt Townley]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have tried using AME to export it and it crashes, too. My current plan to try and save my deadline is to Render the sequence in PP and play it back and capture it over SDI to my Pix as a ProRes file and then use the ProRes file to create the deliverables that I need.

I’ll try clearing the media cache files and see if that solves anything.

Thanks!

[Matt Townley]

How about a hybrid approach? Create your PowerPoint based names using whatever merger method works best for you. But then have your operator have a separate computer with some sort of database that they can quickly search by name, which spits out the corresponding number that they can quickly punch in and take on the PPT computer. With the right setup and a tad bit of practice, I think a good operator could make this workflow move pretty darn fast.

[Matt Townley]

What software do you have access to?

Toast can do this easily. You could also do it manually with DVD Studio Pro or Adobe Encore. I’m sure there are others, too.

[Matt Townley]

Chris – I’ll further complicate your question by adding a concern that I had to address recently on the same topic. I have been operating as a “business” for the past 6 years that had a pretty specific focus on post production, including DVD authoring and manufacturing. Over the past 2 years I have returned more to my roots of content creation, and am doing more and more production. I have picked up a lot of work that is much more in the “freelance” realm as an editor or DP, but also my company has taken on more full service production work. I found it necessary to have two difference cards to serve the needs as the “freelancer me” and the “company me.”

One card is all about me as just a part of a company/brand/team. And the other is all about just me and being a part of your team. I find myself very busy juggling both roles.