This blog post is written with the consumers of video production transcripts in mind, rather than the producers (i.e. the transcriptionist). I’ll post a best practices for transcriptionists soon. In this post, I’ll lay out some of the best practices you can use to ensure you get a transcript that is both accurate and informative. A transcript can be an incredibly valuable tool for videographers/video producers, enabling you to dramatically quicken and improve your editing pr

I think there’s tremendous value in having a transcript of a speech or presentation. Let me list off some of the advantages that a transcript gives you. 1) Quality control. With a transcript, you can read through your speech and see where your strengths and weaknesses are in your presentation. Maybe you have an important point that you felt like you really hammered in, but then you look at the transcript and see that it was really only 2 or 3 sentences. You can see where

One of the most important factors in getting a good transcript is having a good recording. After all, the reason one gets a transcript is that one wants to capture information in a more easily accessible way. By having a difficult to understand recording, you are limiting the amount of information that can be gleaned from an audio file, and are really shooting yourself in the foot. Most transcription companies will have various ways of cleaning up the audio, but, as they s

I would like you to think for a minute about the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo; or the painting Le dejeuner des canotiers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Think of the intense amount of detail that both of these artists had to put into these pieces of work. The planning, the precision, the process, and the product. This is much like transcribing. In Transcribing – A True Art form Part I, I mentioned how being able to take what comes from the mout

The English language is one of the most difficult languages for people who speak other languages to learn. Why is this? The English language makes no sense (immediate following examples are borrowed from www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/learning-english-hard) There is no ham in hamburger Neither is there any apple nor pine in pineapple If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? “Overlook” and “oversee” hav