Nutan and Amy hard at work on the subtitles. Did I mention it was hard work?

So, in parts of the world that aren’t North America, they have this game called soccer. Actually they call it football, but when you’re an American and not talking about the NFL kind, you always need to say that first bit.

Football has been throwing itself a party in Europe here in the last month, and since Nepal is situated several time zones away from that continent, matches are broadcast late at night. Quite natural and fair enough, right?

Right.

Except that all of our tapes are in the hands of a rabid soccer football fan–our transcriber–whose day job work schedule is also being violently disrupted by the strikes and make-up days and various other crises that’ve been entertaining us here of late. Poor guy’s being pulled in three ways:

Career (his teaching job) | Money (our transcription job) | Love (the Euro Cup)

So basically our moonlighting language helper is too tired to put in the kind of lunatic all-nighter schedule we take for granted. All because of the soccer freaks in Europe and their poncy Euro Cup or whatever it’s called.

Just kidding, those guys are total jocks, etc. Thank god it’s over.

We’re seriously down to the wire on getting all our stuff translated/subtitled before we leave, which as I type is in two days’ time.

Yipe!

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.