Adobe has slipped in a pretty huge change into 14.0.2 and it seriously affects Transcriptive, the A.I. transcript plugin for Premiere. I’ll get into the details in a moment, but let me get into the important stuff right off the bat: If you are using Premiere 14.0.2 (the latest release) And own Transcriptive 2.0… You need to update to v2.0.3 immediately. Here are the links: Transcriptive 2.0.3 for Mac Transcriptive 2.0.3 for Windows And own Transcriptive 1.x… You can upgrade to Transcriptive 2.x Or you must turn ‘NewWorld’ off (instructions are below) Or keep using Premiere Pro 14.0.1 For the most part Transcriptive is written in Javascript. This relies on Premiere’s ability to process and run that code. In Premiere 14.0.2, Adobe has quietly replaced the very old Extendscript interpreter with a more modern Javascript engine (It’s called ‘NewWorld’ in Adobe parlance and you can read more about it and some of the tech-y details on the Adobe Developer Blog). On the whole, this is a good thing. However, for any plugin using Javascript, it’s a big, big deal. And, unfortunately, it’s a big, big deal for Transcriptive. It completely breaks old versions of Transcriptive. If you’re running Transcriptive 2.x, no problem… we just released v2.0.3 which should work fine with both old and new Javascript Interpreter/engine. If you’re using Transcriptive 1.x, it’s still not exactly a problem but does require some hoop jumping. (and eventually ‘Old World’ will not be supported in Premiere and you’ll be forced to upgrade TS. That’s a ways off, though.) Turning Off New World Here are the steps to turn off ‘NewWorld’ and have Premiere revert back to using ‘Old World’: Press Control + F12 or Command + F12. This will bring up Premiere’s Console. From the Hamburger menu (three lines next to the word ‘Console’), select Debug Database View Scroll down to ScriptLayerPPro.EnableNewWorld and uncheck the box (setting it to False). Restart Premiere Pro When Premiere restarts, NewWorld will be off and Transcriptive 1.x should work normally. So far there are no new major bugs and relatively few minor ones that we’re aware of when using Transcriptive 2.0.3 with Premiere 14.0.2 (with NewWorld=On). There are also a LOT of other improvements in 2.0.3 that have nothing to do with this. Adobe actually gave us a pretty good heads up on this. Of course, in true Anarchist fashion, we tested it early on (and things were fine) and then we tested it last week and things were not fine. So it’s been an interesting week and a half scrambling to make sure everything was working by the time Adobe sent 14.0.2 out into the world. So everything seems to be working well at this point. And if they aren’t, you now know how to turn off all the new fangled stuff until we get our shit together! (but we do actually think things are in good shape)
How transcripts can help you to increase the reach of your Social Media videos
Have you ever considered using Transcriptive to build an effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and increase the reach of your Social Media videos? Having your footage transcribed right after the shooting can help you quickly scan everything for soundbites that will work for instant social media posts. You can find the terms your audience searches for the most, identify high ranked keywords in your footage, and shape the content of your video based on your audience’s behavior. According to vlogger and Social Media influencer Jack Blake, being aware of what your audience is doing online is a powerful tool to choose when and where to post your content, but also to decide what exactly to include in your Social Media Videos, which tend to be short and soundbite-like. The content of your media, titles, video descriptions and thumbnails, tags and post mentions should all be part of a strategy built based on what your audience is searching for. And this is why Blake is using Transcriptive not only to save time on editing but also to carefully curate his video content and attract new viewers. Right after shooting his videos, the vlogger transcribes everything and exports the transcripts as rich text so he can quickly share the content with his team. After that, a Copywriter scans through the transcribed audio and identifies content that will bring traffic to the client’s website and increase ROI. “It’s amazing. I transcribe the audio in minutes, edit some small mistakes without having to leave Premiere Pro, and share the content with my team. After that, we can compare the content with our targeted keywords and choose what I should cut. The editing goes quickly and smoothly because the words are already time-stamped and my captions take no time to create. I just export the transcripts as an SRT and it is pretty much done, explains Blake. Of course, it all starts with targeting the right keywords and that can be tricky, but there are many analytics and measurement applications offering this service nowadays. If you are just getting started in the whole keyword targeting game, the easiest and most accessible way is connecting your In-site Search queries with Google Analytics. This will allow you to get information on how users are interacting with your website, including how much your audience searches, who is performing searches and who is not, and where they begin searching, as well where they head to afterward. Google Analytics will also allow you to find out what exactly people are typing into Google when searching for content on the web. For Blake, using competitors’ hashtags from Youtube has been very helpful to increase video views. “One of the differentials in my work is that I research my client’s competitors on Youtube and identify the VidIQs (Youtube keyword tags) they have been using on their videos so we can use competitive tagging in our content description and video title. This allows the content I produced for the client to show when people search for this specific hashtag on Youtube,” he explains. Blake’s team is also using Google Trends, a website that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. It’s a great tool to find out how often a search term is entered in Google’s search engine, compare it to their total search volume, and learn how search trends varied within a certain interval of time. When asked what would be the last thing he would recommend to video makers wanting to boost their video views on Social Media, Blake had no hesitation in choosing captions. “Social media feeds are often very crowded, fast-moving, and competitive. Nobody has time to open the video as full screen, turn the sound on and watch the whole thing, they often watch the videos without sound, and if the captions are not there then your message will not get through. And Transcriptive makes captioning a very easy process,” he says.
Sometimes we just need to fix flicker it in post. And that’s ok!
It’s been 5 years since we released Flicker Free, and we can for sure say flickering from artificial lights is still one of the main reasons creatives download our flicker removal plugin. From music videos and reality-based videos to episodics on major networks, small productions to feature-long films, we’ve seen strobing caused by LED and fluorescent lights. It happens all the time and we are glad our team could help fix flickering and see those productions look their best as they get distributed to the public. Planning a shoot so you can have control of your camera settings, light setup and color balance is still definitely the best way to film no matter what type of videos you are making. However, flickering is a difficult problem to predict and sometimes we just can’t see it happening on set. Maybe it was a light way in the background or an old fluorescent that seemed fine on the small on-set monitor but looked horrible on the 27″ monitor in the edit bay. Of course, in a perfect world we would take our time to shoot a few minutes of test footage, use a full size monitor to check what the footage looks like, match the frame rate of the artificial light to the frame rate of the camera and make sure the shutter speed is a multiple/division of the AC frequency of the country we are shooting in. Making absolutely sure the image looks sharp and is free of flicker! But we all know this is often not possible. In these situations, post-production tools can save the day and there’s nothing wrong about that! Travel videos are the perfect example of how sometimes we need to surrender to post-production plugins to have a high-quality finished video. Recently, Handcraft Creative co-owner Raymond Friesen shot beautiful images from pyramids in Egypt. He was fascinated by the scenery but only had a Sony A73 and a 16-70mm lens with him. After working on set for 5 years, with very well planned shoots, he knew the images wouldn’t be perfect but decided to film anyways. Yes, the end result was lots of flicker from older LED lights in the tombs. Nothing that Flicker Free couldn’t fix in post. Here’s a before and after clip: Spontaneous filmmaking is certainly more likely to need post-production retouches, but we’ve also seen many examples of scripted projects that need to be rescued by Flicker Free. Filmmaker Emmanuel Tenenbaum talked to us about two instances where his large experience with short films was not able to stop LED flicker from showing up on his footage. He purchased the plugin a few years ago for “I’m happy to see you”, and used it again to be able to finish and distribute Two Dollars (Deux Dollars), a comedy selected in 85 festivals around the world, winner of 8 awards, broadcasted on a dozen TV channels worldwide and chosen as Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere of the week. Curious why he got flicker while filming Two Dollars (Deux Dollars)? Tenenbaum talked to us about tight deadlines and production challenges in this user story! Those are just a few examples of how artificial lights flickering couldn’t be avoided. Our tech support team often receives footage from music video clips, marketing commercials, and sports footage, and seeing Flicker Free remove very annoying, sometimes difficult, flicker in the post has been awesome. We posted some other user story examples on our website so check them out! And If you have some awful flickering footage that Flicker Free helped fix we’d love to see it and give you a shout out on our Social Media channels. Email press@digitalanarchy.com with a link to your video clip!
Interview: The importance of transcripts in documentary filmmaking
The struggle of making documentary films nowadays is real. Competition is high, and budget limitations can stretch a 6-year deadline to a 10 year-long production. To make a movie you need money. To get the money you need decent, and sometimes edited, footage material to show to funding organizations and production companies. And decent footage, well-recorded audio, as well as edited pieces cost money to produce. I’ve been facing this problem myself and discovered through my work at Digital Anarchy that finding an automated tool to transcribe footage can be instrumental in making small and low budget documentary films happen. In this interview, I talked to filmmaker Chuck Barbee to learn how Transcriptive is helping him to edit faster and discussed some tips on how to get started with the plugin. Barbee has been in the Film and TV business for over 50 years. In 2005, after an impressive career in the commercial side of the Film and TV business, he moved to California’s Southern Sierras and began producing a series of personal “passion” documentary films. His projects are very heavy on interviews, and the transcribing process he used all throughout his career was no longer effective to manage his productions. Barbee has been using Transcriptive for a month, but already consider the plugin a game-changer. Read on to learn how he is using the plugin to make a long-form documentary about the people who created what is known as “The Bakersfield Sound” in country music. DA: You have worked in a wide variety of productions throughout your career. Besides co-producing, directing, and editing prime-time network specials and series for the Lee Mendelson Productions, you also worked as Director of Photography for several independent feature films. In your opinion. How important is the use of transcripts in the editing process? CB: Transcripts are essential to edit long-form productions because they allow producers, editors, and directors to go through the footage, get familiarized with the content, and choose the best bits of footage as a team. Although interview oriented pieces are more dependent on transcribed content, I truly believe transcripts are helpful no matter what type of motion picture productions you are making. On most of my projects, we always made cassette tape copies of the interviews, then had someone manually transcribe them and print hard copies. With film projects, there was never any way to have a time reference in the transcripts, unless you wanted to do that manually. Then in the video, it was easier to make time-coded transcripts, but both of these methods were time-consuming and relatively expensive labor wise. This is the method I’ve used since the late ’60s, but the sheer volume of interviews on my current projects and the awareness that something better probably exists with today’s technology prompted me to start looking for automated transcription solutions. That’s when I found Transcriptive. DA: And what changed now that you are using Artificial Intelligence to transcribe your filmed interviews in Premiere Pro? CB: I think Transcriptive is a wonderful piece of software. Of course, it is only as good as the diction of the speaker and the clarity of the recording, but the way the whole system works is perfect. I place an interview on the editing timeline, click transcribe and in about 1/3 of the time of the interview I have a digital file of the transcription, with time code references. We can then go through it, highlighting sections we want, or print a hard copy and do the same thing. Then we can open the digital version of the file in Premiere, scroll to the sections that have been highlighted, either in the digital file or the hard copy, click on a word or phrase and then immediately be at that place in the interview. It is a huge time saver and a game-changer. The workflow has been simplified quite a bit, the transcription costs are down, and the editing process has sped up because we can search and highlight content inside of Premiere or use the transcripts to make paper copies. Our producers prefer to work from a paper copy of the interviews, so we use that TXT or RTF file to make a hard copy. However, Transcriptive can also help to reduce the number of printed materials if a team wants to do all the work digitally, which can be very effective. DA: What makes you choose between highlighting content in the panel and using printed transcripts? Are there situations where one option works better than the other? CB: It really depends on producer/editor choices. Some producers might want to have a hard copy because they would prefer that to work on a computer. It really doesn’t matter much from an editor’s point of view because it is no problem to scroll through the text in Transcriptive to find the spots that have been highlighted on the hard copy. All you have to do is look at the timecode next to the highlighted parts of a hard copy and then scroll to that spot in Transcriptive. Highlighting in Transcriptive means you are tying up a workstation, with Premiere, to do that. If you only have one editing workstation running Premiere, then it makes more sense to have someone do the highlighting with a printed hard copy or on a laptop or any other computer which isn’t running Premiere. DA: You mentioned the AI transcription is not perfect, but you would still prefer that than paying for human transcripts or transcribing the interviews yourself. Why do you think the automated transcripts are a better solution for your projects? CB: Transcriptive is amazing accurate, but it is also quite “literal” and will transcribe what it hears. For example, if someone named “Artie” pronounces his name “RD”, that’s what you’ll get. Also, many of our subjects have moderate to heavy accents and that does affect accuracy. Another thing I have noticed is that, when there is a clear difference between the
Using After Effects to create burned-in subtitles from SRTs
Recently, an increasing number of Transcriptive users have been requesting a way of using After Effects to create burned-in subtitles using SRTs from Transcriptive. This made us anarchists get excited about making a Free After Effects SRT Importer for Subtitling And Captions. Captioning videos is more important now than ever before. With the growth of mobile and Social Media streaming, YouTube and Facebook videos are often watched without sound and subtitles are essential to retain your audience and make them watchable. In addition to that, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has implemented rules for online video that require subtitles so people with disabilities can fully access media content and actively participate in the lives of their communities. As a consequence, a lot of companies have style guides for their burned-in subtitles and/or want to do something more creative with the subtitles than what you get with standard 608/708 captions. I mean, how boring is white, monospaced text on a black background? After Effects users can do better. While Premiere Pro does allow some customization of subtitles, creators can get greater customization via After Effects. Many companies have style guides or other requirements that specify how their subtitles should look. After Effects can be an easier place to create these types of graphics. However, it doesn’t import SRT files natively so the SRT Importer will be very useful if you don’t like Premiere’s Caption Panel or need subtitles that are more ‘designed’ than what you can get with normal captions. The script makes it easy to customize subtitles and bring them into Premiere Pro. Here’s how it works: Go to the registration page our registration page. Download the .jsxbin file. Put it here: Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\Support Files\Scripts\ScriptUI Panels Mac: Applications\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\Scripts\ScriptUI Panels 4. Restart AE. It’ll show up in After Effects under the Window\Transcriptive_Caption 5. Create a new AE project with nothing in it. Open the panel and set the parameters to match your footage (frame rate, resolution, etc). When you click Apply, it’ll ask for an SRT file. It’ll then create a Comp with the captions in it. Select the text layer and open the Character panel to set the font, font size, etc. Feel free to add a drop shadow, bug or other graphics. 7. Save that project and import the Comp into Premiere (Import the AE project and select the Comp). If you have a bunch of videos, you can run the script on each SRT file you have and you’ll end up with an AE project with a bunch of comps named to match the SRTs (currently it only supports SRT). Each comp will be named: ‘Captions: MySRT File’. Import all those comps into Premiere. 8. Drop each imported comp into the respective Premiere sequence. Double-check the captions line up with the audio (same as you would for importing an SRT into Premiere). Queue the different sequences up in AME and render away once they’re all queued up. (and keep in mind it’s beta and doesn’t create the black backgrounds yet). Although especially beneficial to Transcriptive users, this free After Effects SRT Importer for Subtitling And Captions will work with any SRT from any program and it’s definitely easier than all the steps above make it sound and it is available for all and sundry on our website. Give it a try and let us know what you think! Contact: sales@digitalanarchy.com
Your transcripts are out of order! This whole timeline’s out of order!
When cutting together a documentary (or pretty much anything, to be honest), you don’t usually have just a single clip. Usually there are different clips, and different portions of those clips, here, there and everywhere. Our transcription plugin, Transcriptive, is pretty smart about handling all this. So in this blog post we’ll explain what happens if you have total chaos on your timeline with cuts and clips scattered about willy nilly. If you have something like this: Transcriptive will only transcribe the portions of the clips necessary. Even if the clips are out of order. For example, the ‘Drinks1920’ clip at the beginning might be a cut from the end of the actual clip (let’s say 1:30:00 to 1:50:00) and the Drinks cut at the end might be from the beginning (e.g. 00:10:00 to 00:25:00). If you transcribe the above timeline, only 10:00-25:00 and 1:30:00-1:50:00 of Drinks1920.mov will be transcribed. If you Export>Speech Analysis, select the Drinks clip, and then look in the Metadata panel, you’ll see the Speech Analysis for the Drinks clip will have the transcript for those portions of the clip. If you drop those segments of the Drinks clip into any other project, the transcript comes along with it! The downside to _only_ transcribing the portion of the clip on the timeline is, of course, the entire clip doesn’t get transcribed. Not a problem for this project and this timeline, but if you want to use the Drinks clip in a different project, the segment you choose to use (say 00:30:00 to 00:50:00) may not be previously transcribed. If you want the entire clip transcribed, we recommend using Batch Transcribe. However, if you drop the clip into another sequence, transcribe a time span that wasn’t previously transcribed and then Export>Speech Analysis, that new transcription will be added to the clips metadata. It wasn’t always this way, so make sure you’re using Transcriptive v1.5.2. If you’re in a previous version of Transcriptive and you Export>Speech Analysis to a clip that already has part of a transcript in SA, it’ll overwrite any transcripts already there. So feel free to order your clips any way you want. Transcriptive will make sure all the transcript data gets put into the right places. AND… make sure to Export>Speech Analysis. This will ensure that the metadata is saved with the clip, not just your project.
Shooting 4K to Create Vertical Videos for Social Media
Vertical Video is here to stay. It still makes me cringe a bit when I see people filming portrait. Since my early video journalism classes back in Brazil, shooting landscape ratio was a set rule that has always felt natural. However, nowadays the reality is that, sooner or later, a client will ask you to shoot and edit high-quality videos for their Social Media pages. And Social Media channels are mainly accessed through smartphones and tablets, which means posting portrait videos will be essential to engage and build a strong audience. Shooting vertical is easy when you just want to post some footage of your weekend fun, but requires a change of perspective when the goal is to produce, shoot and edit professional videos instead. In that case, it’s important to produce a video that has a vertical aspect ratio in mind from the beginning of the process. But what happens when your production is meant to screen across different platforms and needs to fit vertical aspect ratio requirements? In this case, shooting 4K is gives you a lot of flexibility in post. Most social video is posted at HD resolution, so why 4K? Cropping horizontal video to fit vertical screen usually leads to very pixelated and low-quality footage. When your frames need to be taller than they are wide, your standard 16:9 frame will need to be dramatically resized to fit the 9:16 smartphone screen and your regular HD resolution won’t allow for the image to stay sharp and clean. Shooting 4K will give you extra pixels to work with and make it easy to reposition the frame in post as you wish. In addition to having more room for reframing, if your original footage has a quadrupled resolution then you can zoom in cleanly since you have a much better source video to work with. This is a huge advantage because Vertical Video is all about showing detail so you can make a deeper connection with your audience. 4K will give you the flexibility to efficiently adjust to vertical and square formats, and still preserve the option to watch a broader image of your subject on our beloved 16:9 standard film and television format. Of course, you can always just upload a horizontal video on Instagram or Snachap, but don’t expect your audience to take the time to turn their phones around just to watch your video. Chances are they will keep holding their phone with one hand and careless watch your footage in a small window across the screen. It’s obvious that adjusting to 9:16 aspect ratio requires a change of perspective and demands us to rethink the way we produce, shoot and edit video. But isn’t it what film school is always trying to teach us? Formats are changing, vertical streaming is a very strong distribution method, and mobile filmmaking is growing every day. It’s up to us, video makers, to reflect on the changes and find a balance between adjusting to our audiences and not losing image quality. I don’t believe vertical video will ever replace landscape aspect ratios, but I do think it is a solid format for short internet videos so let’s take advantage of it and get ready for the next challenge.
Women in tech still body shame themselves in silence. Why?
Recently our CEO Jim Tierney invited me to start a Podcast for Digital Anarchy. I have a journalism background and at first, the idea did not sound too bad: it would actually be awesome to take the time to chat with industry folks in a regular basis and be paid for it. The challenge began when he said I would do a video podcast, interviewing all these awesome people on camera. It may sound silly to some people, but the idea of watching myself on camera terrifies me. Believe it or not, to this day I have not watched a video interview I gave at NAB last April. I have only listened to it, and noticing my accent in each answer was enough to make me skip the image part. Since that day Jim invited me to start the “videocast”, I have been trying to understand my fear of being on camera and my relationship with my own image. As a media professional, why can’t I look at myself on the screen? Digging into that question brought unexpected answers and the need to talk about a problem every woman faces at least once in their lives, if not all the time: beauty standards. Being skinny has always been a prerequisite to be beautiful in my culture. It is difficult, painful, and traumatizing to grow up in Brazil as a not-so-skinny girl. If you are overweight it means you are also sedentary, unhealthy and unattractive by proxy. And believe me, you do not need to have much fat to be considered overweight in Brazil. My curly hair also did not help. Although I am from Salvador, which has the biggest African descendance in Brazil, curly hair was not a thing until very recently. I grew up straightening my hair with chemicals and only stopped doing that 4 years ago. It is hard to admit and think back, but looking at my graduation pictures from 10 years ago, looking at the popular girls at school, I realized I was just trying to belong. I always knew most of my insecurities came from the dissatisfaction with the way a look, but I also learned very early on that not feeling pretty does not mean I am not pretty. What it means is that society sets unachievable beauty standards for women and that I must fight that daily if I want to be productive and help to minimize the harm our industry has caused to women. This was enough to deal with my own insecurity and keep me going. What I didn’t realize is that it wasn’t enough to solve the problem. Every day the media reminds you of what it means to be beautiful to society: tall, skinny, and mostly white. Blacks, Latinas, middle-eastern are now accepted. They just need to be skinny. It’s an old and well-known problem, and although a lot of women are freeing themselves from it, most of us still compare ourselves to this woman we see on TV sometimes. In my case, I started to notice that those intangible standards can impact not only my eating and exercising habits; what I wear and how I wear the clothes I buy; but it can influence my behavior and stop me from growing professionally if I don’t face it. What can we can do to minimize the harm our industry has already caused to women is clear to me: we must stand up and fight for inclusion, equal rights, full access to every job position available in the industry. We must include all body types in commercials, magazines, TV shows. We must have women featuring not only as personal assistant AI voices, but also coding and training the AI technology. However, for those who are already aware of this or working on solving the big picture, I ask: what can we do to do not only free other women but truly free ourselves and stop shaming our own images silently? I don’t fully know the answer, but I will start with producing, editing and hosting the Digital Anarchy podcast. It will be incredibly difficult, but I can’t wait to discuss media-making with you all. Stay tuned! More info coming up soon. Carla Prates, Transcriptive/Digital Anarchy carla@digitalanarchy.com
VFX: L.A. band invests on visual effects to create a parallel universe in music videos
Releasing new products is awesome, but to me, the best part of working for a video/photo plugin company is to see how our clients are using our products day-to-day. From transcription to flicker removal and skin retouching, content creators all over the world are using plugins to create better content and images. There are so many talented content creators making cool stuff out there! This week we talked to Margarita Monet, lead singer of Edge of Paradise. The band — Dave Bates-guitars, David Ruiz – guitars, Vanya Kapetanovic – bass, and Jimmy Lee – drums — has been taking advantage of visual effects to enrich their music and create unique videos. In this interview, Margarita discusses how visual effects are helping to shape Edge of Paradise’s identity and explains how she has been using Beauty Box Video to improve the image quality of her videos. Digital Anarchy: How would you describe the Edge of Paradise music and style? Monet: Our music has evolved over the years. I would say we started with traditional hard rock and heavy metal, influenced by the classic bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. But our music evolved into something more of a cinematic hard rock with an industrial edge. I incorporated the piano and keyboard which gave some songs a symphonic feel to them. Our music is very dynamic, with blood pumping drums, epic choruses all moved by heavy guitar riffs. But we also have very melodic and dynamic piano ballads. The upcoming album Universe really showcases what Edge Of Paradise is all about, and we are so excited to share this unique sound we created! Digital Anarchy: Since the very beginning, your music videos have been full of visual effects. Where do all the VFX ideas come from? Are they mostly done in post-production? Monet: Most of the visual effects we actually tried to capture on camera and enhance it in post. Except for one of the Lyric Videos ( Dust To Dust ) that was all done in After Effects. Dust to Dust, 2017: Usually, ideas came from me, and whoever we were working with helped us bring them to life. We’ve had to get very creative playing with light, with props, building the settings. And as the band grows our videos get more and more elaborate and we all get more creative. We recently released a music video we shot in Iceland (Face of Fear), that one was directed by Val Rassi and edited by Robyn August. No visual effects there, just all scenery captured by an amazing drone pilot Darren LaFreniere! Face of Fear, 2019: Digital Anarchy: How long does it usually take to produce your videos? Is the whole band always involved in each stage of production? Monet: Depends on the video. Some take about a month, where I come up with an idea and location/setting and we shoot it. Some videos take longer with a lot of planning and it’s a group effort. And there is always something we have to do in between, whether it’s playing shows or touring. Filming usually is a 1-2 day shoot, and we allow about 1-2 months for editing to be done. We plan as much as possible and try to create beautiful shots for each take. However, things don’t always go as planned or we can’t achieve the perfect look we want. That’s when visual effects come handy. Recently we shot a live video of an acoustic version of one of our songs. It was shot in a recording studio and we had some limitation with lighting. I was searching for something I could do to polish up the look and came across Digital Anarchy. When using 4K cameras, it creates a very high-quality image, and all the details are visible, so we decided to try Beauty Box video. It is such a great tool to polish up the look! Extremely effective and time efficient. Digital Anarchy: How is Beauty Box helping you to achieve the look you want on your music videos? Monet: We put so much effort into creating the settings and the “world” of the video that it’s only expected to have everything look polished and coherent. Sometimes we might have this great shot, but one of our faces looks shiny, or the light is not completely flattering. Beauty Box can fix those issues and allow us to use the shot we want! Digital Anarchy: What was your first music video as a band and what do you think has changed so far? Monet: Our first video was Mask, it sounds and looks like a completely different band. We had to start somewhere. It’s a well-done video, we’ve had probably the largest crew working on that to date, over 10 people, and we learned a lot from it! It was also a different lineup, so the band was still evolving. But it does not even come close to what we look and sound like now! Mask, 2012: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HDq-bs_JBh4 Digital Anarchy: Would you say the visual effects applied to photos and videos nowadays are part of the band’s identity? Monet: Yes, we want to transport people to another world, and we want to do that in our live show as well. That is why we are building our stage show to reflect the imagery of the band when we start touring in support of the upcoming album Universe. Our vision from the beginning was always larger than life so I would say it’s a part of our identity. I want our content to make a big impact visually. We put so much time and effort into our songs to make sure all our music, from songwriting to production, is the best it can be. We have to do the same with video! And now we can put more time and effort into creating videos that tell great stories; that are visually stunning and are of the highest quality. That is essential to keeping the band growing. I think the
Someone Tell The NCAA about Flicker Free
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know it’s March Madness… time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament. This is actually my favorite two weekends of sports a year. I’m not a huge sports guy, but watching all the single elimination games, rooting for underdogs, the drama, players putting everything they have into these single games… it’s really a blast. All the good things about sport. It’s also the time of year that flicker drives me a little crazy. One of the downside of developing Flicker Free is that I start to see flicker everywhere it happens. And it happens a lot during the NCAA tournament. Especially slow motion shots . Now, I understand that those are during live games and playing it back immediately is more important than removing some flicker. Totally get it. However, for human interest stories recorded days or weeks before the tournament? Slow motion shots used two days after they happened? C’mon! Spend 5 minutes to re-render it with Flicker Free. Seriously. Here’s a portion of a story about Gonzaga star Rui Hachimura: Most of the shots have the camera/light sync problem that Flicker Free is famous for fixing. The original has the rolling band flicker that’s the symptom of this problem, the fixed version took all of three minutes to fix. I applied Flicker Free, selected the Rolling Bands 4 preset (this is always the best preset to start with) and rendered it. It looks much better. So if you know anyone at the NCAA in post production, let them know they can take the flicker out of March Madness!
PowerSearch: Instantly Find Anything in Your Premiere Pro Project
We’ve released PowerSearch 1.0 for Premiere Pro! It’s a new part of the Transcriptive suite of tools that’s essentially a search engine for Premiere letting you search clips, sequences, markers, metadata and captions all in one place. It streamlines your editing by allowing you to quickly search hours of video for words or phrases. While it works best when used in conjunction with Transcriptive, it plays well with any service that can get transcripts or SRTs (captions) into Premiere Pro. It’s all about helping you find data, we don’t care where the data comes from. Like any search engine, it displays a list of results . In most cases, clicking on the result takes you to the exact moment the words were spoken in either the Source panel (clips) or the Timeline panel (sequences). If you’ve ever been asked to find a 15 second quote and had to dig through 50 hours of footage to find it, you know how valuable of a time saving tool this is. You can get a free, unrestricted seven day trial by going to digitalanarchy.com. With PowerSearch and Transcriptive you can make everything in your project instantly searchable! So check it out and see for yourself how much time it can save. Get more information, tutorials and the free trial: https://digitalanarchy.com/premiere-search/powersearch.html
Transcriptive: Beyond automated video transcriptions
I decided to try Transcriptive way before I became part of the Digital Anarchy family. Just like any other aspiring documentary filmmaker, I knew relying on a crew to get my editing started was not an option. Without funding you can’t pay a crew; without a crew you can’t get funding. I had no money, an idea in my head, some footage shot with the help of friends, and a lot of work to do. Especially when working on your very first feature film. Besides being an independent Filmmaker and Social Media strategist for DA, I am also an Assistive Technology Trainer for a private company called Adaptive Technology Services. I teach blind and low vision individuals how to take advantage of technology to use their phones and computers to rejoin the workforce after their vision loss. Since the beginning of my journey as an AT Trainer – I started as a volunteer 6 years ago – I have been using my work to research the subject and prepare for this film. My movie is about the relationship between the sighted and non-sighted communities. It seeks to establish a dialog between people with and without visual disabilities so we can come together to demystify disabilities to those without them. I know it is an important subject, but right from the beginning of this project I learned how hard it is to gather funds for any disability-related initiative. I had to carefully budget the shoots and define priorities. Paying a post-production crew was not (and still is not) possible. I have to write and cut samples on my own for now. Transcriptive was a way for me to get things moving by myself so I can apply for grants in the near future and start paying producers, editors, camera operators, sound designers, and get the project going for real. The journey started with transcribing the interviews. Transcriptive did a pretty good job with transcribe the audio from the camera as you can see below. Accuracy got even better when transcribing audio from the mic. The idea of getting accurate automated transcripts brought a smile to my face. But could Artificial Intelligence really get the job done for me? I never believed so, and I was right. The accuracy for English interviews was pretty impressive. I barely had to do any editing on those. The situation changed as soon as I tried transcribing audio in my native language, Brazilian Portuguese. The AI transcription didn’t just get a bit flaky; it was completely unusable so I decided to do not waste more time and start doing my manual transcriptions. I have been using Speechmatics for most of my projects because the accuracy is considerably higher than Watson with English. However, after trying to transcribe in Portuguese for the first time, it occurred to me Speechmatics actually offers Portuguese from Portugal while Watson transcribes Portuguese from Brazil. I decided to give Watson a try, but the transcription was not much better than the one I got from Speechmatics. It is true the Brazilian Portuguese footage I was transcribing was b-roll clips recorded with a Rhode mic; placed on top of my DSLR. They were not well mic’d sit down interviews. The clips do have decent audio, but also involve some background noise that does not help foreign language speech-to-text conversion. At the time I had a deadline to match and was not able to record better audio and compare Speechmatics and Watson Portuguese transcripts. Will be interesting to give it another try, with more time to further compare and evaluate if there are advantages on using Watson for my next batch of footage. Days after my failed attempt to transcribe Brazilian Portuguese with Speechmatics, I went back to the Transcriptive panel for Premiere, found an option to import my human transcripts, gave it a try, and realized I could still use Transcriptive to speed up my video production workflow. I could still save time by letting Transcriptive assign timecode to the words I transcribed, which would be nearly impossible for me to do on my own. The plugin allowed me to quickly find where things were said in 8 hours of interviews. Having the timecode assigned to each word allowed me to easily search the transcript and jump to that point in my video where I wanted to have a cut, marker, b-roll or transition effect applied. My movie is still in pre-production and my Premiere project is honestly not that organized yet so the search capability was also a huge advantage. I have been working on samples to apply for grants, which means I have tons of different sequences, multicam sequences, markers that now live in folders inside of folders. Before I started working for DA I was looking for a solution to minimize the mess without having to fully organize it or spend too much money and Power Search came to the rescue. Also, being able to edit my transcripts inside of Premiere made my life a lot easier. Last month, talking to a few film clients and friends, I found out most filmmakers still clean up human transcripts. In my case, I go through the transcripts to add punctuation marks and other things that will remind me how eloquent speakers were in that phrase. Ellipses, question marks and exclamation points remind me of the tone they spoke allowing me to get paper cuts done faster. I am not sure ASR technology will start entering punctuation in the future, but it would be very handy to me. While this is not a possibility, I am grateful Transcriptive now offers a text edit interface, so I can edit my transcripts without leaving Premiere. For the movie I am making now I was lucky enough to have a friend willing to help me getting this tedious and time-consuming part of the work done so I am now exporting all my transcripts to Transcriptive.com. The app will allow us to collaborate on the transcript.
