Thursday, June 12th, 2008...11:46 pm
Translation/Transcription Timeglut! Help?
We’ve got an excellent guy working on it. Suman is friend-of-a-friend of the Little Sisters Fund, and it’s all going great. Well, almost all.
That the way we’re doing it is to log/capture our tapes (so that the data is safe on our Dulce drive), then we give Suman the tape and our second camera to work with. He uses the camera to playback the tape, and translates/transcribes the material into a Word file.
But there’s some problems there. Namely, we don’t want to be out our second camera, and we don’t want our tapes–or our camera for that matter–to get eaten up reviewing and cueing repeatedly.
Folks are suggesting we burn DVD’s or Quictime files of each tape, with a timecode stamp on the screen to give the translator. But after several hours of testing, I can’t find any way to do this that doesn’t demand something like three times the length of the tape to encode (and that’s before a DVD burn). I guess this is because we’re using HDV for capture, and a re-encode must crunch a lot of data for any kind of output.
We’ve got at least 15-20 tapes we need translated, and I’m not sure there are enough hours in the days we have left here to get it all burnt off.
So we’re off to buy a 500GB firewire drive, onto which we’ll copy Final Cut’s capture files, which are in Quicktime format. Then we’ll load Quicktime Pro for Windows on our translator’s machine, which will enable him to view these files with their native timecode showing in the window.
This way, we’ll have an extra drive, we won’t need to give up our camera, we keep our precious tapes sacred and sound, and we can get more material in the hands of Suman, the translator, quicker. Also, working with the Quicktime player should be quicker starting and pausing the playback, as compared with the sluggish HV20.
We are hopeful this will help us solve what looks like a HUGE problem of time.
4 Comments
June 13th, 2008 at 4:56 am
Sounds like a frustrating problem. Can’t help you with the time of encoding problem, but on a related note about time- I’m not sure this will work for you or that you need it, but I thought I’d pass along… The Amazing Slow Downer.
http://www.ronimusic.com/
Remember when we were in your little cabin in J&P’s backyard, and I was searching for a way to slow down audio files for ease of transcription? Well, this software lives up to its name. Slows down the audio as much as you want without changing the pitch and has made my life enormously easier (not that transcription isn’t still a huge pain, but it’s much much better). Is also has easy one-key commands to stop, start, go back, etc., another time saver.
My audio files are mp4a, which is one file type the software reads, and I think is also a type of video file? My technical skills are quite limited here, and I have no idea if this could slow down video- audio (?) but just in case…or if you need it for slowing audio files in the future…
It’s only $49.95, and there’s a free trial version.
Love,
Jennie
June 13th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Well, all I can say is that you guys are the Bomb! I am just SO much enjoying reading of your exploits- The situations you are finding, the people you are meeting and just the WAY you two think about these things…. Man, it gives me freekin’ goosbumps! I have to tell you that this is quite the vicarious thrill to read of his whole project- I gues I would love to do just what you are doing, but it sounds like it is just so much work! I am content to just sit here on the coast of Maine and try to run a busy taqueria whilst my wife is stuck in bed puking her guts out in gestational bliss (!!). It will be a long summer, here in Sargentville…….
Anyway, you two keep up the insanely good work you are doing. I don’t know if it is possible to demonstrate any more love or respect for anything you might try to document than what I see from you guys. I have not seen a second of film yet, and I can already feel the love that you have for these people that are making pictures of. Your blend of concern and interest for the tools, the trade and the concept is simply stunning. To say how proud I am of you both seems a bit trite, but I am just way over the top with admiration for you guys- You’s a bunch of baddasses!
June 14th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
“You’s a bunch of baddasses!”
Ditto that.
CB
June 15th, 2008 at 4:03 am
Hi Guys.
I have used a couple of different ways to approach this.
The low budget way is to have someone sitting beside camera with a lapel mic that speaks the native language and record their translation after the person interviewed answers. It gets you close and you can actually edit pieces together with dubbed responses or weed through clips that at least have responses you are interested in using and get them translated (instead of using all of the interview). This works okay if the interview answers are short rather than long.
A fellow filmmaking friend users a company in India that uses QT audio files for translation. It is not referenced with timecode, but he can create a system based on the wording in paragraphs (he logs what timecode starts at each paragraph or thought and that is close enough). I have not used them, but it is fairly inexpensive (I wonder why?) and he emails/FTP’s clips and never leaves his office.
I recently picked up a Matrox MXO and can now add the timecode stamp from FCP in real time with out any rendering (I feel your rendering pain!). So I hook up the MXO and build sequences with sound bites I like and lay off in real time to a DVD burner (MXO has the ability to lay off in SD in real time). I get a DVD window dub of the best interviews and review/log that.
I have not worked on a foreign language film for a few years, so this works easy for English speaking interviews. The last foreign language film I used method one (low budget version) and got everything close and then had the client review the film and basically transcribed the foreign language interview parts so I could add subtitles accurately.
I like your idea of the hard drive and think that was probably the best solution. Save the wear and tear on those tapes and now you have a back up - good move!
John
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