I like it when a bit written by one among 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 mix 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 presently engaged on a no-budget quick documentary on Argentine tango, which options round a dozen folks speaking about why they dance, and the way it has modified them as folks.

The format is a mixture of interview and dance footage, with the interviews shot in my condominium front room. A few of the interview will seem as to-camera, whereas most of it is going to 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 report a standalone audio observe 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 immediately. I may have merely discarded the digital camera audio, then used Ultimate Lower Professional’s automated sync function to synchronize the separate audio observe with the video, and edit from the compound clip.

However the issue was fairly refined, and I didn’t hear it till a lot of the edit was full. The interviewee’s hair was typically hitting the mic clipped onto her shirt, creating these slight ‘clicking’ sounds. These had been quiet sufficient that I hadn’t heard them in the course of the edit, and I believe most individuals wouldn’t even discover, but it surely 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 couple of 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 is able to have been a very tedious course of, particularly as I’d in some circumstances 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 had been pleased that I precisely conveyed their ideas.)

However working the audio file although MacWhisper meant that, simply 90 seconds later, I had an entire, time-stamped transcript. I may then seek for a phrase used within the edit, and instantly bounce to that a part of the audio file to substitute it for the unique. A couple 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 venture in future, getting that transcript can be the very first thing I do, as it will even have made it sooner to establish the clips I wished to make use of within the first place. In case you work with audio or video, I extremely suggest it. The free model did the whole lot 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.