I find it irresistible when a bit written by one in every of my colleagues alerts me to an app which then seems to be extremely helpful, which is strictly what occurred once I learn Filipe’s piece about MacWhisper audio transcription.
A mixture of my belt-and-braces strategy to filmmaking, and MacWhisper, saved the day when a video recording was nearly ruined by some errant hair …
I’m at present engaged on a no-budget quick documentary on Argentine tango, which options round a dozen individuals speaking about why they dance, and the way it has modified them as individuals.
The format is a mixture of interview and dance footage, with the interviews shot in my house front room. Among the interview will seem as to-camera, whereas most of will probably be narrated over the dance footage.
For the audio, I’m utilizing lavalier mics for the interviewees, with wi-fi transmitters sending the audio direct to the digital camera. However as a agency believer in a belt-and-braces strategy, I additionally file a standalone audio monitor on a separate sound recorder.
There was an issue with the unique audio in one of many interviews, which might have been a straightforward repair if it had been obvious straight away. I might have merely discarded the digital camera audio, then used Ultimate Reduce Professional’s automated sync function to synchronize the separate audio monitor with the video, and edit from the compound clip.
However the issue was slightly delicate, and I didn’t hear it till many of the edit was full. The interviewee’s hair was generally hitting the mic clipped onto her shirt, creating these slight ‘clicking’ sounds. These have been quiet sufficient that I hadn’t heard them throughout the edit, and I think most individuals wouldn’t even discover, nevertheless it was sufficient to trouble me when later reviewing the footage.
At that time, it was too late to sync the separate audio file, because the edit had concerned chopping up the interview into a few billion element items and utilizing clips of round 20 seconds at a time from an interview of as many minutes.
What I wanted to do was discover the related audio within the 20-minute file. This may have been a very tedious course of, particularly as I’d in some instances used half a sentence from one part and mixed it with half a sentence from one other. (The interviewees did, after all, get to approve my edits, to make sure they have been completely satisfied that I precisely conveyed their ideas.)
However operating the audio file although MacWhisper meant that, simply 90 seconds later, I had a whole, time-stamped transcript. I might then seek for a phrase used within the edit, and instantly leap to that a part of the audio file to substitute it for the unique. A number of frame-level nudges noticed the video and audio correctly lip-synced. The entire course of took just some minutes. (Is it simply me, by the best way, or do different discover it laborious to work out whether or not the audio is forward of the video, or vice-versa, when it’s out by solely two or three frames?)
In any related mission in future, getting that transcript shall be the very first thing I do, as it might even have made it quicker to establish the clips I needed to make use of within the first place. In case you work with audio or video, I extremely advocate it. The free model did all the pieces I wanted, however I purchased the Professional improve as a small thank-you to the developer.
MacWhisper audio transcription is out there in each free and paid (one-off $25 buy) variations.
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