Thanks for trying or purchasing Eff-it!

It’s a great tool for automatically bleeping out words in Premiere and this quick start guide should get you up and running in no time.

How to Use Eff-It!

Press the Eff-It! button! That’s it!

Ok, well… sort of. There are probably a few things you have to do first:

– Load a sequence that has a single video or audio track.

– Get or Import a transcript for the video/audio

– Add curse words to the Flagged Words List

– THEN press Eff-It! button and… boom! It’ll create a bleeped version of your clip or sequence in the Eff-It bin.

Let’s dive a little deeper into those steps

Eff-It! Button

You do need to set some things up first, but this is the magic button. This button is available in two places:

– In the main navigation bar at the top of the panel (as shown above)

– In the Flagged Words List dialog

The button does the same thing in both places and will use the options you set in the Flagged Words dialog in both cases.

Your original sequence or clip is not effected. What Eff-It! does is create a new sequence by analyzing the transcript and replacing curse words with asterisks and placing a beep sound in the sequence where curse words are. (It also removes the section of clip audio with the curse word. AGAIN, all this is done to a copy of the clip/sequence, NOT the original.)

You may have to tweak the exact start/end of the beep. The transcription services are pretty accurate about per-word timecode, but they aren’t perfect. So the beep may start a frame or two after the beginning of the word. Usually it works fine, but you do want to check it.

To make this easy, the UI has a ‘Next Curse Word’ button (and keyboard shortcut) so you can jump from one word to the next without having to listen to the entire video clip.

That’s the basic way it works. Let’s talk about using the panel itself.

Launching the Panel

In Premiere go to Window>Extentions and select Eff-it!

Licensing

When the panel first appears, you should see a Serial Number Setup dialog. You can log in with your Anarchy Cloud here. If you purchased it, you should have received a serial number and can enter that here (right hand side of the panel). You don’t need to login (but we recommend you do).

Trial: If you’re just trying it out, click Trial License. You’ll need to enter in your Name and Email address to create an Anarchy Cloud account (you’ll need to validate the email by clicking on a registration link) and that will give you a seven day free trial of Eff-it! You’ll also get 30 minutes of free transcription time from our Transcriptive service.

The Transcriptive service is generally more accurate and requires less clean up than the free Adobe transcripts. So may be worth the extra cost if you find yourself spending a lot of time cleaning up the Adobe captions. In any case, you get 30 minutes free.

What’s Supported: Clips or Single Track Sequences

Eff-it! Only works on clips and single track sequences. As such, we recommend you use Eff-It! as the first or last step in your editing process.

Premiere sequences can be very complex and there are a lot of transitions and effects that can’t be applied programmatically through Premiere’s API. So to keep things simple (and ensure Eff-It! actually works) it only works on one video and audio track.

We realize this is a bit limiting and we’re working on possible ways to work around it.

Clips: When you Eff-It! a clip, a sequence will be created that contains the clips and edits for the bleeps. You can the sequence as a nested sequence in your main edit.

Sequences: Eff-it only supports sequences with a single track of video and single track of audio. While you can have multiple clips on the track, Eff-It! does not support transitions or effects. It should be a very basic stringout of clips if you’re going to have multiple clips.

Getting Transcripts

Eff-It! requires transcripts to work. That’s how it knows what words to bleep out and where they are. There are a couple ways to get transcripts:

Transcriptive Service: Transcribe with Transcriptive. After the first 30 minutes there is a cost for this. You can transcribe almost any language.

Importing and Aligning: For English you can import a transcript file, either text or SRT, and then use the free Alignment function.

Align will analyze both the imported text and the audio waveform. It’ll then assign timecode to every word based on the original audio. It’s usually as accurate as natively transcribed transcripts.

This is how you would get Adobe transcripts into Eff-It!

• Export a text file out of Premiere’s Text panel
• import it into Eff-it!. (Adobe’s transcripts are a proprietary format and can’t be read directly unfortunately)
• In the Import dialog you’ll see an option to automatically align the text. If you want to do this later using the Align button, uncheck this.

Languages other than English must be transcribed using the Transcriptive Service for now.

If you’re using other transcription services that allow you to export JSON files, we might be able to import those in the future. We recommend contacting us to let us know what service you’re using. The more people we hear from using a given service, the more likely it is we’ll support it! 

Flagged Words Dialog

This is where you tell Eff-It! what words you want to bleep.

If you just want to add words, you click Save whne you’re done, but you can also Eff-It!, which will create the bleeped sequence.

 We try to automatically find common English curse words and usually that works pretty well but sometimes you’ll need to add words.

This is especially true for non-English languages where Eff-It! will not automatically find the words.

You don’t need to enter in every word, just the root word. So, for example:

‘shit’ will find any variation of the word:

bullshit
shitstorm
Holyshitastic

Folks can get pretty creative in how they use curse words and Eff-It! supports these creative expressions!

However, this does mean some words might get bleeped you don’t intend.

‘ass’ is particularly problematic as many words contain that combination of letters (e.g. bass, assign, tassel, etc). We will support exact match quotes i.e…. “ass” but that’s not implemented in 1.0. Probably 1.0.1

Bleep Sounds

By default we use the standard 440hz beep.

However, there’s also the option of a lower pitched sound (250hz) or a higher pitch (1kh).

You can also use your own sounds!

If you want to use the sound of a duck quacking, click the Add Sound File button and select the audio file you want to use.

Caption Options

By default Eff-It! will turn the entire curse word into asterisks. (e.g. ****)

There are two other options:

– Keep the first letter: S***

– Keep the first and last letter: S**t

These DO NOT effect the length of the bleep. The transcription services are not that precise. Usually the timecode the services have for each word are good enough to bleep the word, but not so accurate that we could leave just the beginning of the word.