I probably have mentioned that we’re working on a documentary about Bob Muravez/Floyd Lippencotte Jnr in part because we wanted demo footage we “owned” (so we could make tutorials available down the line) but also because I wanted to try it in action on a practical job.
I start work in prEdit shortly – nearly started today, so it looks like Friday now – but already we discovered some ideas that have now been implemented in the 1.1. release.
Along the way I’ve learnt a lot about how well (or not) Adobe’s Speech Analysis works. (Short answer: it can be very, very good, or it can be pretty disappointing.) As prEdit is really designed to be used with transcriptions I also tested the Adobe Story > OnLocation > Premiere method, which always worked.
Well, from that workflow it became obvious that speakers (Interviewer, Subject) were correctly identified so wouldn’t it be nice if prEdit automatically subclipped on speaker changes. And now it does.
If multiple speakers have been identified in a text transcript, prEdit will create a new subclip on import at each change of speaker
It also became obvious as I was planning my workflow that we needed a way to add new material to an existing prEdit project, and to be able to access the work from historic projects to add to a new one.
New Copy Clips… button so you can copy clips from one prEdit project to another open project
Now that I’m dealing with longer interviews than when we tested, I needed search in the Transcript view.
Search popup menu added to Transcript View.
That led to one problem: adding metadata to multiple subclips at a time. Previously I’d advocated adding common metadata to the clip before subclipping in prEdit (by simply adding returns to the transcript) but if it comes in already split into speakers, that wasn’t going to work!
Logging Information and Comments can be added for multiple selected subclips if the field doesn’t already have an entry for any of the selected subclips
Because you never, ever want to run the risk of over-writing work ready done.
And some nice enhancements:
Faster creation of thumbnails
Bugfix for Good checkbox in Story View
prEdit 1.1 is now available. Check for updates from within the App itself. And if you work in documentary, you should have checked it out already.
2 replies on “prEdit reaches 1.1 after first month”
Philip,
I was wondering how useful you thought prEdit might be for use in linguistic field research and what other tools from documentary use might be useful for such tasks as creating multi-lingual transcriptions from field video?
It’s a major task for field linguists, as you can imagine, So big that 10% of an archive transcribed is considered acceptable.
// Tony
I guess, once again, that getting the transcript is the costly part? prEdit doesn’t solve that problem.
We use Adobe’s technology to get a time stamp for each word in the video. we track those timestamps and generate ‘on the fly’ subclips and then building edits.
Since I know almost nothing (let’s say nothing) about linguistic field research, I don’t know if this would be useful or not. My guess is not, as it really is designed as a better way to do a paper cut for a documentary.
Auto speech to text is coming – Google have some good technology as do Spinvox. Adobe uses Autonomy but the results are very variable. We did about half the transcriptions in the Adobe world, correcting auto transcripts, and about half by doing a transcript and running it through Story and OnLocation. The latter workflow seems best.
Philip