Wildly OT, transcription software

Can anyone point me to resources for automated transcription. One of my clients has a huge pile of tapes to transcribe and was asking about an Apple solution to automate the process. The last time I tried this was more than 10 years ago, and it was close to impossible.

Premeire Pro apparently has transcription software built in.

supposed to be about 80% correct.

i haven't used it.


nick

Yeah- I wouldn't say that's exactly wildly or even mildly off topic tho...

Noah

Final Cut Studio Training, featuring the HVX200, EX1, EX3, DVX100, DVDSP and Color at [www.callboxlive.com]!
Author, RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera available now at: [www.amazon.com].
Editors Store- Gifts and Gear for Editors: [www.editorsstore.com]

In Premiere it's called "Speech To Text" and it's closer to 90% effective based on a demo I witnessed. Premiere has a few extra nice tools & capabilities that FCP doesn't have...like editing AVCHD files right on a FLASH card (no conversion to ProRes needed). I upgraded my Adobe Grafix Suite to Production Premium to get Premiere Pro and a few other nice toys included in the package (On Location, Media Encoder, Device Central, FLASH, Encore, Sound Booth & more).

Highly recommended

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I saw the Adobe demo at one of the LAFCPUG meetings and it looked hugely impressive. Given the fluidity of language, a computer is never going to completely replace a human transcriber, but just 80 per cent accuracy would save a transcriber loads and loads of time, just by saving him from having to type every "um", "uh" and "the". Big, complicated words are, ironically, a lot easier to correct; I've done a substantial amount of text, academic and journalistic proofreading, and I am convinced that if I had to transcribe a huge project, this would be good enough.


www.derekmok.com

Coolest part is once you have the text transcript you can click on any word and the video jumps right to the matching spot. We need this badly in FCP...

Noah

Final Cut Studio Training, featuring the HVX200, EX1, EX3, DVX100, DVDSP and Color at [www.callboxlive.com]!
Author, RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera available now at: [www.amazon.com].
Editors Store- Gifts and Gear for Editors: [www.editorsstore.com]

Not wildly OT all. Transcription is a very common postpro need.

In my experience, speech to text works pretty well, but if and only if the audio is recorded well. If there's a lot of background noise, it runs into trouble pretty quickly.

The main problem I've found though occurs when you have someone speaking english who is not a native speaker. I had to transcribe recently from French, Italian, German and Arabic interview partners whereby the interviews were conducted in English. Speech to text got the interviewer's questions pretty well, but went completely off into the wildnerness with the responses. Not even close. There's no "filter this segment for heavy French accent" function. In addition to that, the interviews were with various telecom CEO's who were using a lot of tech jargon and business lingo even most mortals would understand, muchless a computer. No go on any of that.

Granted, when it works it's a huge time-saver, but there are limitations. Be aware of that before jumping in and certainly before planning your time and budgeting the job. You may well end up doing it the hard way.

Download the demo version and give it a spin to make sure.

Clay

Mister Joe

How do you archive the images you've edited from the hard media ?

like if you'd like to modify the sequence a few months later ?

can you make a copy of the flash card, keep it on a drive, re-open project and relink ? does this work fine ?

Thanks for the input folks. I think Premeire may be a bit of overkill for this application. Pretty neat function to have in an editing program tho. Let's hope that migrates to Final Cut Studio.

When I created the thread I thought that transcription might not quite fit into a forum that is described in part as:

"Your basic troubleshooting forum for all things FCP"

Little did I know at the time that transcription was a function of edit software, or at least one edit product.

-Vance

Actually it works through sound booth in the adobe CS4 suite -- and it works well - sometimes-- have tried it to transcribe tapes - long chunks -- depending on who's speaking - it can work - really great - or really lousy -- and it's been 50/50 on some interviews - but when it works - it's amazing

The best you can do for final cut work - is export the transcript and quickly reallign timecode with it -- but it is a huge time saver when it works right -- in Premier you can take the file and just click on the text to jump to the bite

Funny, several months ago in a thread about being able to search for certain text within markers, I wanted to ask - tongue in cheek - if there was a way to search for certain words in an audio track. I guess that's not so far-fetched after all.

Scott

Last I tried the PPro transcription did not work well on the audio files I had (but they were in English, of course).

I think the only current option (aside of finding a web based transcription service you can send audio files too) is to get the Dragon speech recognition software, train it to your voice and then repeat whatever is being said on the tape...

If you do get a transcription then Avid's Script Sync is definitely worth a look... (if you were on Avid, of course) ;-)