Anyone transcribing speeches, etc?

[Adrian Tan]

I've been thinking about it for a while. Main purpose: if you're going to construct a 15, 25-minute film out of audio grabs, maybe a transcript would make the whole process less painful and save considerable time. After all, you could instantly see where to go in a speech to pull out the bits you want, and you wouldn't necessarily need to listen to the speech in real time in the first place. You could also do a "paper edit". Many interview-based TV programs are done this way: transcription first; then producer works it out on paper, perhaps adding narration where necessary; then editors work their magic.

Google tells me that companies charge $1 to $2 per minute to type it up. But possibly you could increase your package price to account for this, or maybe the savings in editing time would be worth it without increasing your package prices.

Crazy idea? What do you think? Or were you already doing this?

I suppose possibly you could also sell a transcription as an additional product to the couple: get it printed as a nice booklet, perhaps along with photographs.

[Daniel Latimer]

Interesting idea. Wouldn't be too expensive. I would imagine that, eventually, our NLE will start to have this function built in.

Currently, I don't transcode word for word, but take notes with timecode on them, while starring the bits I like. I can type fast enough with notes to be at almost real time. I wonder too if you would miss out on inflections and such if you were only reading or if that would make a difference at all.

If you decide to do this, I would interested to hear your reaction to it.

[Matthias Claflin]

I typically type out the entirety of the speeches in a document and then use it to decide what parts I want to use. As I cut words/phrases/sentences that I don't need, I do the same to the audio clip. So in a way, I'm already doing a version of this.

[Adrian Tan]

Originally Posted by Daniel Latimer

Interesting idea. Wouldn't be too expensive. I would imagine that, eventually, our NLE will start to have this function built in.

Might be worth mentioning that Premiere used to have this function, but it was removed in CC 2015. If you install an older version you can still access it. Adobe has an explanation somewhere to the effect that they didn't think it was up to scratch, so didn't want to continue it.