By Barry Goch

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to go behind the scenes at Warner Bros. to cover the UHD HDR remastering of The Wizard of Oz. I had recorded audio of the entire experience so I could get accurate quotes from all involved — about an hour of audio. I then uploaded the audio file to Rev.com and waited. And waited. And waited. A few days later they came back and said they couldn’t do it. I was perplexed! I checked the audio file, and I could clearly hear the voices of the different speakers, but they couldn’t make it work.

That’s when my editor, Randi Altman, suggested Digital Anarchy’s Transcriptive, and it saved the day. What is Transcriptive? It’s an automated, intelligent transcription plugin for Adobe Premiere editors designed to automatically transcribe video using multiple speech and natural language processing engines with accuracy.

Well, not only did Transcriptive work, it worked super-fast, and it’s affordable and simple to use … once everything is set up. I spent a lot of time watching Transcriptive’s YouTube videos and then had to create two accounts for the two different AI transcription portals that they use. After a couple of hours of figuring and setup, I was finally good to go.

Digital Anarchy has lots of videos on YouTube about setting up the program. Here is a link to the overview video and a link to 2.0 new features. After getting everything set up, it took less than five minutes from start to finish to transcribe a one-minute video. That includes the coolest part: automatically linking the transcript to the video clip with word-for-word accuracy.

Transcriptive extension

Step by Step
Import video clip into Premiere, select the clips, and open the Transcriptive Extension.

Tell Transcriptive if you want to use an existing transcript or create a new transcription.

Then choose the AI that you want to transcribe your clip. You see the cost upfront, so no surprises.

Launch app

I picked the Speechmatics AI:

Choosing AI

Once you press continue, Media Encoder launches.

Media Encoder making FLAC file automatically.

And Media Encoder automatically makes a FLAC file and uploads it to the transcription engine you picked.

One minute later, no joke, I had a finished transcription linked word-accurately to my source video clip.

Final Thoughts
The only downside to this is that the transcription isn’t 100% accurate. For example, it heard Lake Tahoe as “Lake Thomas” and my son’s name, Oliver, as “over.”

Final transcription

This lack of accuracy is not a deal breaker for me, especially since I would have been totally out of luck without it on The Wizard of Oz article, which you can read here. For me, the speed and ease of use more than compensates for the lack of accuracy. And, as AI’s get better, the accuracy will only improve.

And on February 27, Digital Anarchy released Transcriptive V.2.0.3, which is compatible with Adobe Premiere v14.0.2. The update also includes a new prepaid option that can lower the cost of transcription to $2.40 per hour of footage. Transcriptive’s tight integration with Premiere makes it a must-have for working with transcripts when cutting long- and short-form projects.

Barry Goch is a finishing artist at LA’s The Foundation as well as a UCLA Extension Instructor, Post Production. You can follow him on Twitter at @Gochya