Adobe just released a big new Premiere update that includes their Speech-to-Text service. We’ve had a lot of questions about whether this kills Transcriptive or not (it doesn’t… check out the new Transcriptive Rough Cutter!). So I thought I’d take a moment to talk about some of the differences, similarities, and how to use them together. The Adobe system is basically what we did for Transcriptive 1.0 in 2017. So Transcriptive Rough Cutter has really evolved into an editing and collaboration tool, not just something you use to get transcripts. The Adobe solution is really geared towards captions. That’s the problem they were trying to solve and you can see this in the fact you can only transcribe sequences. And only one at a time. So if you want captions for your final edit, it’s awesome. If you want to transcribe all your footage so you can search it, pull out selects, etc… it doesn’t do that. So, in some ways the Transcriptive suite (Transcriptive Rough Cutter, PowerSearch, TS Web App) is more integrated than Adobe’s own service. Allowing you to transcribe clips and sequences, and then search, share, or assemble rough cuts with those transcripts. There are a lot of ways using text in the editing process can make life a lot easier for an editor, beyond just creating captions. Sequences Only The Adobe transcription service only works for Sequences. It’s really designed for use with the new Caption system they introduced earlier this year. Transcriptive can transcribe media and sequences, giving the user a lot more flexibility. One example: they can transcribe media first, use that to find soundbites or information in the clips and build a sequence off that. As they edit the sequence, add media, or make changes they can regenerate the transcript without any additional cost. The transcripts are attached to the media… so Transcriptive just looks for which portions of the clips are in the sequence and grabs the transcript for that portion. Automatic Rough Cut Rough Cut: There are two ways of assembling a ‘rough cut’ with Transcriptive Rough Cutter. What we’re calling Selects, which is basically what I mention above in the ‘Sequences Only’ paragraph: Search for a soundbite, you set In/Out points in the transcript of the clip with that soundbite, and insert that portion of the video into a sequence. Then there’s the Rough Cut feature, where Transcriptive RC will take a transcript that you edit and assemble a sequence automatically: creating edits where you’ve deleted or struckthrough text and removing the video that corresponds to those text edits. This is not something Adobe can do or has made any indication they will do, so far anyways. Collaboration with The Transcriptive Web App One key difference is the ability to send transcripts to someone that does not have Premiere. They can edit those transcripts in a web browser and add comments, and then send it all back to you. They can even delete portions of the text and you can use the Rough Cut feature to assemble a sequence based on that. Searching Your Premiere Project PowerSearch: This separate panel (but included with TS) lets you search every piece of media in your Premiere project that has a transcript in metadata or in clip/sequence markers. Premiere is pretty lacking in the Search department and PowerSearch gives you a search engine for Premiere. It only works for media/sequences transcribed by Transcriptive. Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, made their transcript format proprietary and we can’t read it. So unless you export it out of Premiere and then import it into Transcriptive, PowerSearch can’t read the text unfortunately. Easier to Export Captions Transcriptive RC let’s you output SRT, VTT, SCC, MCC, SMPTE, or STL just by clicking Export. You can then use these in any other program. With Adobe you can only export SRT, and even that takes multiple steps. (you can get other file formats when you export the rendered movie, but you have to render the timeline to have it generate those.) I assume Adobe is trying to make it difficult to use the free Adobe transcripts anywhere other than Premiere, but I think it’s a bit shortsighted. You can’t even get the caption file if you render out audio… you have to render a movie. Of course, the workaround is just to turn off all the video tracks and render out black frames. So it’s not that hard to get the captions files, you just have to jump through some hoops. Sharing Adobe Transcripts with Transcriptive Rough Cutter and Vice Versa I’ve already written a blog post specifically about showing how to use Adobe Transcripts with Transcriptive. But, in short… You can use Adobe transcripts in Transcriptive by exporting the transcript as plain text and using Transcriptive’s Alignnment feature to sync the text up to the clip or sequence. Every word will have timecode just as if you’d transcribed it in Transcriptive. (this is a free feature) AND… If you get your transcript in Transcriptive Rough Cutter, it’s easy to import it into the Adobe Caption system… just Export a caption file format Premiere supports out of Transcriptive RC and import it into Premiere. As mentioned, you can Export SRT, VTT, MCC, SCC, SMPTE, and STL. Two A.I. Services Transcriptive Rough Cutter gives you two A.I. services to choose from, allowing you use whatever works best for your audio. It is also usually more accurate than Adobe’s service, especially on poor quality audio. That said, the Adobe A.I. is good as well, but on a long transcript, even a percentage point or two of accuracy will add up to saving a significant amount of time cleaning up the transcript.
Using Adobe Premiere Pro Transcripts and Captions with Transcriptive (updated for Premiere 2022)
In this post we’ll go over how to use transcripts from Premiere’s Text panel with Transcriptive. This could be easier if Adobe exported the transcript with all the timecode data. We’ve asked them to do this but it will probably mean more coming from users. So please feel free to request that from them. Currently it’s not hard, but does require a couple more steps than it should. Anyways, once you export the Adobe transcript, you’ll use Transcriptive’s Alignment feature to convert it! Easy and free. Also, if you’re trying to get captions out of Transcriptive and into Premiere, you can do that with any version of Premiere. Since this is easy, just Export out of Transcriptive and Import in Premiere, I’ll cover it last. Getting Transcripts from Adobe Sensei (Premiere’s Text panel) into Transcriptive You can use either SRTs or Plain Text files to get the transcript into Transcriptive. Usually once the transcript is in Transcriptive you’ll want to run Alignment on it (which is free). This will sync the text up to the audio and give you per-word timecode. If you do this, exporting as a plain text file is better as you’ll be able to keep the speakers. (Adobe SRT export doesn’t support speakers) However, SRTs have more frequent timestamps so if Alignment doesn’t work or you want to skip that step, SRTs are better. However, the per-word timecode may not be perfect as Transcriptive will need to interpolate between timestamps. One advantage of SRTs is you can use Transcriptive Adobe Importer which will import the SRT and automatically align it. Making it a bit easier. But it’s not that big of a deal to manually run alignment. This does not support Text files. Getting the transcript in Premiere 1. Open up the Text panel from the Window menu. 2. You should see three options, one of which is Transcribe Sequence You can only transcribe sequences with Adobe’s service. If you want to transcribe individual clips, you’ll still need to use Transcriptive. (or get transcripts by dropping each one into a different sequence) 3. With your sequence selected, click the Transcribe Sequence button and Premiere will process it and return the transcript! (This can take a few minutes) Exporting a Text File in Premiere 2022 Once the transcript is back, go to the menu in the upper, right corner and select Export to Text File. In Premiere 2022 you can do this with either Transcript or Captions selected. In 2021, this only works from Captions. (Export Transcript saves to a proprietary Adobe format that is not readable by third party plugins, so it has to be a Text File. ) Exporting a Text File in Premiere 2021 Step 1: In Premiere 2021, once the transcript is back, you need to turn it into captions. You can not export it from the Transcript tab as in Premiere 2022. So click the Caption button to convert the transcript into captions. Step 2: Premiere will create the captions. From the Caption tab, you can export as SRT or Plain Text. Select ‘Export to text file’ and save the file. Exporting SRTs in Premiere 2022 and 2021 It is basically the same as the steps above for exporting a Text file in Premiere 2021. In both 2022 and 2021 you need to turn the transcript into captions and then Export to SRT File from the Caption menu. (so in Step 2 above, do that instead of Export to Text File) Note that in Premiere 2022 the ‘create captions’ button is the closed caption icon. Back in Transcriptive Rough Cutter 1. Going back to Transcriptive, we can now import the Plain Text file. With your sequence or clip selected, click Transcriptive’s Import button and select the Plain Text file. The settings in Import don’t really matter that much, unless you have Speakers. Since we’re going to use Alignment to get the per-word accurate timecode, the Import timecode settings are mostly moot. That should bring the text into Transcriptive. 2. Click on the Transcribe Button. When the Transcribe dialog appears, select Alignment from the ‘Transcribe With’ dropdown. This is done offline and it’s free for English! There is an option to align using the A.I. services. However, those are not free. But if you want to align languages other than English that’s the only option currently. 3. Click OK… and Transcriptive will start processing the text and audio of the sequence, adding accurate timecode to the text, just as if you’d transcribed it from scratch! So that’s how you get the Adobe transcription into Transcriptive! (If Adobe had just added a feature to export the transcript with the timecode it already had in the Text panel… none of the above would be necessary. But here we are. So you should put in a feature request for that!) Again, Adobe’s transcription service only works for sequences. So if you have a bunch of clips or media you want to transcribe, the easiest way is to use our Batch Transcribe function. And while Transcriptive’s transcription isn’t free, it’s only .04/min ($2.40/hr). However, as mentioned, you can drop each clip into a sequence and transcribe them individually that way. Once you’ve done that, you can use our Batch Alignment feature to get all the transcripts into Transcriptive! Getting Captions from Transcriptive into Premiere’s Caption System This is an easy one. You can export a variety of different caption formats from Transcriptive: SRT, MCC, SCC, EBL, SMPTE, and more. 1. Click the Export button in Transcriptive. From there you can select the caption format you want to use. SRT and SCC are the common ones. 2. Back in Premiere, Import the caption file into your project. Premiere will automatically recognize it as a caption file. When you drop it onto your sequence, it’ll automatically load into the Caption tab of Premiere’s Text panel. Easy peasy. That’s all there is to it!
Transcriptive Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard Shortcuts are a huge part of Transcriptive and can make working in it much faster/easier. These are for Transcriptive 2.x/3.x. If you’re still using 1.x, please check the manual. Ctrl + Space: Play / Stop Undo: Ctrl + Z (Mac and PC) Redo: Ctrl + Shift + Z MAC USERS: Mac OS assigns Cmd+Z to the application (Premiere) and we can’t change that. Editing text: Ctrl + Left Arrow – Previous Word | Ctrl + Right Arrow – Next Word Merging/Splitting Lines/Paragraphs: Ctrl + Shift + Up OR [Delete]: Merge Line/paragraph with line above. Ctrl + Shift + Down OR [Enter}: Split Line/paragraph into two lines. (These behave slightly differently. ‘Control+Shift+up’ will merge the two lines together no matter where the cursor is. If you’re trying to combine a bunch of lines together, this is very fast. [Delete] uses the cursor position, which has to be at the beginning of the line to merge the lines together.) Up or Down Arrow: Change Capitalization Ctrl + Backspace: Delete Word | Ctrl + Delete: Delete Word Ctrl + Up: Previous Speaker | Ctrl + Down: Next Speaker Editing Video (Clip Mode only): Control + i: Set In Point in Source panel Control + o: Set Out Point in Source panel Control + , (comma): Insert video segment into active sequence (this does the same thing as , (comma) in the Source panel) Control + u : Clear In & Out Points (necessary for sharing)
Converting an SRT (or VTT) Caption File to Plain Text File for Free
This is a quick blog post showing you how to use the free Transcriptive trial version to convert any SRT caption file into a text file without timecode or line numbers (which SRTs have). You can do this on Transcriptive.com or if you have Premiere, you can use Transcriptive for Premiere Pro. This can occur because you have a caption file (SRT or VTT) but don’t have access to the original transcript. SRT files tend to look like this: 1 00:00:02,299 –> 00:00:09,100 The quick brown fox 2 00:00:09,100 –> 00:00:17,200 hit the gas pedal and And you might want normal human readable text so someone can read the dialog, without the line numbers and timecode. So this post will show you how to do that with Transcriptive for free! We are, of course, in the business of selling software. So we’d prefer you bought Transcriptive BUT if you’re just looking to convert an SRT (or any caption file) to a text file, the free trial does that well and you’re welcome to use it. (btw, we also have some free plugins for After Effects, Premiere, FCP, and Resolve HERE. We like selling stuff, but we also like making fun or useful free plugins) Getting The Free Trial License As mentioned, this works for the Premiere panel or Transcriptive.com, but I’ll be using screenshots from the panel. So if you’re using Transcriptive.com it may look a little bit different. You do need to create a Transcriptive account, which is free. When the panel first pops up, click the Trial button to start the registration process: You then need to create your account, if you don’t have one. (If you’re using Transcriptive.com, this will look different. You’ll need to manually select the ‘free’ account option.) Importing the SRT Once you register the free trial license, you’ll need to import the SRT. If you’re on Transcriptive.com, you’ll need to upload something (could be 10sec of black video, doesn’t matter what, but there has to be some media). If you’re in Premiere, you’ll need to create a Sequence first, make sure Clip Mode is Off (see below) and then you can click IMPORT. Once you click Import, you can select SRT from the dropdown. You’ll need to select the SRT file using the file browser (click the circled area below). Then click the Import button at the bottom. You can ignore all the other options in the SRT Import Window. Since you’re going to be converting this to a plain text file without timecode, none of the other stuff matters. After clicking Import, the Transcriptive panel will look something like this. The text from the SRT file along with all the timecode, speakers, etc: Exporting The Plain Text File Alright… so how do we extract just the text? Easy! Click the Export button in the lower, left corner. In the dialog that gets displayed, select Plain Text: The important thing here is to turn OFF ‘Display Timecode’ and ‘Include Speakers’. This will strip out any extra data that’s in the SRT and leave you with just the text. (After you hit the Export button) That’s it! Ok, well, since caption files tend to have lines that are 32 characters long you might have a text file that looks like this: The quick brown fox hit the gas pedal and If you want that to look normal, you’ll need to bring it into Word or something and replace the Paragraphs with a Space like this: And that will give you: The quick brown fox hit the gas pedal and And now you have human readable text from an SRT file! A few steps, but pretty easy. Obviously there are lots of other things you can do with SRTs in Transcriptive, but converting the SRT to a plain text file is one that can be done with the free trial. As mentioned, this also works with VTT files as well. So grab the free trial of Transcriptive here and you can do it yourself! You can also request an unrestricted trial by emailing cs@digitalanarchy.com. While this SRT to Plain Text functionality works fine, there are some other limitations if you’re testing out the plugins for transcripts or editing the text.
A.I. Speech-to-Text: How to make sure your data isn’t being used for training
We get a fair number of questions from Transcriptive users that are concerned the A.I. is going to use their data for training. First off, in the Transcriptive preferences, if you select ‘Delete transcription jobs from server’ your data is deleted immediately. This will delete everything from the A.I. service’s servers and from the Digital Anarchy servers. So that’s an easy way of making sure your data isn’t kept around and used for anything. However, generally speaking, the A.I. services don’t get more accurate with user submitted data. Partially because they aren’t getting the ‘positive’ or corrected transcript. When you edit your transcript we aren’t sending the corrections back to the A.I. (some services are doing this… e.g. if you correct YouTube’s captions, you’re training their A.I.) So the audio by itself isn’t that useful. What the A.I. needs to learn is the audio file, the original transcript AND the corrected transcript. So even if you don’t have the preference checked, it’s unlikely your audio file will be used for training. This is great if you’re concerned about security BUT it’s less great if you really WANT the A.I. to learn. For example, I don’t know how many videos I’ve submitted over the last 3 years saying ‘Digital Anarchy’. And still to this day I get: Dugal Accusatorial (seriously), Digital Ariki, and other weird stuff. A.I. is great when it works, but sometimes… it definitely does not work. And people want to put this into self-driving cars? Crazy talk right there. If you want to help the A.I. out, you can use the Speech-to-Text Glossary (click the link for a tutorial). This still won’t train the A.I., but if the A.I. is uncertain about a word, it’ll help it select the right one. How does the glossary work? The A.I. analyzes a word sound and then comes up with possible words for that sound. Each word gets a ‘confidence score’. The one with the highest score is the one you see in your transcript. In the case above, ‘Ariki’ might have had a confidence of .6 (out 0 to 1, so .6 is pretty low) and ‘Anarchy’ might have been .53. So my transcript showed Ariki. But if I’d put Anarchy into the Glossary, then the A.I. would have seen the low confidence score for Ariki and checked if the alternatives matched any glossary terms. So the Glossary can be very useful with proper names and the like. But, as mentioned, nothing you do in Transcriptive is training the A.I. The only thing we’re doing with your data is storing it and we’re not even doing that if you tell us not to. It’s possible that we will add the option in the future to submit training data to help train the A.I. But that’ll be a specific feature and you’ll need to intentionally upload that data.
Dumb A.I., Dumb Anarchist: Using the Transcriptive Glossary
We’ve been working on Transcriptive for like 3 years now. In that time, the A.I. has heard my voice saying ‘Digital Anarchy’ umpteen million times. So, you would think it would easily get that right by now. As the below transcript from our SRT Importing tutorial shows… not so much. (Dugal Accusatorial? Seriously?) ALSO, you would think that by now I would have a list of terms that I would copy/paste into Transcriptive’s Glossary field every time I get a transcript for a tutorial. The glossary helps the A.I. determine what ‘vocal sounds’ should be when it translates those sounds into words. Uh, yeah… not so much. So… don’t be like AnarchyJim. If you have words you know the A.I. probably won’t get: company names, industry jargon, difficult proper names (cool blog post on applying player names to an MLB video here), etc., then use Transcriptive’s glossary (in the Transcribe dialog). It does work. (and somebody should mention that to the guy that designed the product. Oy.) Overall the A.I. is really accurate and does usually get ‘Digital Anarchy’ correct. So I get lazy about using the glossary. It is a really useful thing…
Importing an SRT into Premiere Pro 2020 & 2021
(The above video covers all this as well, but for those who’d rather read, than watch a video… here ya go!) Getting an SRT file into Premiere is easy! But, then it gets not so easy getting it to display correctly. This is mostly fixed in the new caption system that Premiere 2021 has. We’ll go over that in a minute, but first let’s talk about how it works in Premiere Pro 2020. (if you only care about 2021, then jump ahead) Premiere Pro 2020 SRT Import 1: Like you would import any other file, go to File>Import or Command/Control+I. 2: Select the SRT file you want. 3: It’ll appear in your Project panel. 4: You can drag it onto your timeline as you would any other file. Now the fun starts. 5: From the Tools menu in the Program panel (the wrench icon), make sure Closed Captions are enabled. 5b: Go into Settings and select Open Captions 6: The captions should now display in your Program panel. 7: In many cases, SRT files start off being displayed very small. Those bigger captions sure look good! 8: USUALLY the easiest way to fix this is to go to the Caption panel and change the point size. You do this by Right+Clicking on any caption and ‘Select All’. (this is the only way you can select all the captions) 8b: With all the captions selected, you can then change the Size for all of them. (or change any other attribute for that matter) 9: The other problem that occurs is that Premiere will bring in an SRT file with a 720×486 resoltion. Not helpful for a 1080p project. In the lower left corner of the Caption panel you’ll see Import Settings. Click that to make sure it matches your Project settings. Other Fun Tricks: SRTs with Non-Zero Start Times If your video has an opening without any dialog, your SRT file will usually start with a timecode other than Zero. However, Premiere doesn’t recognize SRTs with non-zero start times. It assumes ALL SRT files start at zero. If yours does not, as in the example below, you will have to move it to match the start of the dialog. You don’t have to do this with SRTs from Transcriptive. Since we know you’re likely using it in Premiere, we add some padding to the beginning to import it correctly. If your captions start at 05:00, Premiere puts them at 00:00 Importing an SRT file in Premiere 2021: The New Caption System! (as of this writing, I’m using the beta. You can download the beta by going to the Beta section of Creative Cloud.) 0: If you’re using the beta, you need to enable this feature from the Beta menu. Click it on it and ‘Enable New Captions’. 1: Like you would import any other file, go to File>Import or Command/Control+I. 2: Select the SRT file you want. 3: It’ll appear in your Project panel. 4: You can drag it onto your timeline as you would any other file… BUT This is where things get different! 4b: Premiere 2021 adds it to a new caption track above the normal timeline. You do need to tell Premiere you want to treat them as Open Captions (or you can select a different option as well) 4c: And Lo! It comes in properly sized! Very exciting. 5: There is no longer a Caption panel. If you want to edit the text of the captions, you need to select the new Text panel (Windows>Text). There you can edit the text, add new captions, etc. 6: To change the look/style of the captions you now need to use the Essential Graphics panel. There you can change the font, size, and other attributes. Overall it’s a much better captions workflow. So far, from what I’ve seen it works pretty well. But I haven’t used it much. As of this writing it’s still in beta and regardless there may be some quirks that show up with heavier use. But for now it looks quite good.
Fixing Flicker in Videos with Lots of Motion – Fast Moving Cameras or Subjects
One of the things Flicker Free 1.0 doesn’t do well is deal with moving cameras or fast moving subjects. This tends to result in a lot of ghosting… echos from other frames Flicker Free is analyzing as it tries to remove the flicker (no people aren’t going to stop talking to you on dating apps because you’re using FF). You can see this in the below video as sort of a motion blur or trails. Flicker Free 2.0 does a MUCH better job of handling this situation. We’re using optical flow algorithms (what’s used for retiming footage) as well as a better motion detection algorithm to isolate areas of motion while we deflicker the rest of the frame. You can see the results side-by-side below: Better handling of fast motion, called Motion Compensation, is one of the big new features of 2.0. While the whole plugin is GPU accelerated, Motion Compensation will slow things down significantly. So if you don’t need it, it’s best to leave it off. But when you need it… you really need it and the extra render time is worth the wait. Especially if it’s critical footage and it’s either wait for the render or re-shoot (which might not be so easy if it’s a wedding or sports event!). We’re getting ready to release 2.0 in the next week or so, so just a bit of tease of some of the amazing new tech we’ve rolled into it!
Improving Accuracy of A.I. Transcripts with Custom Vocabulary
The Glossary feature in Transcriptive is one way of increasing the accuracy of the transcripts generated by artificial intelligence services. The A.I. services can struggle with names of people or companies and it’s a big of mixed bag with technical terms or industry jargon. If you have a video with names/words you think the A.I. will have a tough time with, you can enter them into the Glossary field to help the A.I. along. For example, I grabbed this video of MLB’s top 30 draft picks in 2018: Obviously a lot names that need to be accurate and since we know what they are, we can enter them into the Glossary. As the A.I. creates the transcript, words that sound similar to the names will usually be replaced with the Glossary terms. As always, the A.I. analyzes the sentence structure and makes a call on whether the word it initially came up with fits better in the sentence. So if the Glossary term is ‘Bohm’ and the sentence is ‘I was using a boom microphone’, it probably won’t replace the word. However if the sentence is ‘The pick is Alex boom’, it will replace it. As the word ‘boom’ makes no sense in that sentence. Here are the resulting transcripts as text files: Using the Glossary and Normal without Glossary Here’s a short sample to give you an idea of the difference. Again, all we did was add in the last names to the Glossary (Mize, Bart, Bohm): With the Glossary: The Detroit Tigers select Casey Mize, a right handed pitcher. From Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. With the second selection of the 2018 MLB draft, the San Francisco Giants select Joey Bart a catcher. A catcher from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, with the third selection of a 2018 MLB draft. The Philadelphia Phillies select Alec Bohm, third baseman Without the Glossary: The Detroit Tigers select Casey Mys, a right handed pitcher. From Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. With the second selection of the 2018 MLB draft, the San Francisco Giants select Joey Bahrke, a catcher. A catcher from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, with the third selection of a 2018 MLB draft. The Philadelphia Phillies select Alec Bomb. A third baseman As you can see it corrected the names it should have. If you have names or words that are repeated often in your video, the Glossary can really save you a lot of time fixing the transcript after you get it back. It can really improve the accuracy, so I recommend testing it out for yourself! It’s also worth trying both Speechmatics and Transcriptive-A.I. Both are improved by the glossary, however Speechmatics seems to be a bit better with glossary words. Since Transcriptive-A.I. has a bit better accuracy normally, you’ll have to run a test or two to see which will work best for your video footage. If you have any questions, feel free to hit us up at cs@digitalanarchy.com!
Transcriptive and 14.x: Why New World Needs to be Off
Update: For Premiere 14.3.2 and above New World is working pretty well at this point. Adobe has fixed various bugs with it and things are working as they better. However, we’re still recommending people keep it off if they can. On long transcripts ( over 90 minutes or so) New World usually does cause performance problems. But if having it off causes any problems, you can turn it on and Transcriptive should work fine. It just might be a little slow on long transcripts. Original Post: There are a variety of problems with Adobe’s new Javascript engine (dubbed New World) that’s part of 14.0.2 and above. Transcriptive 2.0 will now automatically turn it off and you’ll need to restart Premiere. Transcriptive 2.0 will not work otherwise. If you’re using Transcriptive v1.5.2, please see this blog post for instructions on turning it off manually. For the most part Transcriptive, our plugin for transcribing in Premiere, is written in Javascript. This relies on Premiere’s ability to process and run that code. In Premiere 14.0.x, 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. There are a number of problems with it that, as of 14.1, break both old and new versions of Transcriptive. As with most new systems, Adobe fixes a bunch of stuff and breaks a few new things. So we’re hoping over the next couple months they work all the kinks out and it all sorts itself out. There is no downside to turning New World off at this point. Both the old and new Javascript engines are in Premiere, so it’s not a big deal as of now. Eventually they will remove the old one, but we’re not expecting that to happen any time soon. As always, we will keep you updated. Fwiw, here’s what you’ll see in Transcriptive if you open it with New World turned on: That message can only be closed by restarting Premiere. If New World is on, Transcriptive isn’t usable. So you _must_ restart. What we’re doing in the background is setting a flag to off. You can see this by pulling up the Debug Console in Premiere. Use Command+F12 (mac) or Control+F12 (windows) to bring up the console and choose Debug Database from the hamburger menu. You’ll see this: If you want to turn it back on at some point, this is where you’ll find it. However, as mentioned, there’s no disadvantage to having it off and if you have it on, Transcriptive won’t run. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at cs@digitalanarchy.com.
Transcriptive: Here’s how to transcribe using your Speechmatics credits for now.
If you’ve been using Speechmatics credits to transcribe in Transcriptive, our transcription plugin for Premiere Pro, then you noticed that accessing your credits in Transcriptive 2.0.2 and later is not an option anymore. Speechmatics is discontinuing the API that we used to support their service in Transcriptive, which means your Speechmatics credentials can no longer be validated inside of the Transcriptive panel. We know a lot of users still have Speechmatics credits and have been working closely with Speechmatics so those credits can be available in your Transcriptive account as soon as possible. Hopefully in the next week or two. In the meantime, there are a couple ways users can still transcribe with Speechmatics credits. 1) Use an older version of Transcriptive like v1.5.2 or v2.0.1. Those should still work for a bit longer but uses the older, less accurate API or 2) Upload directly on their website and export the transcript as a JSON file to be imported into Transcriptive. It is a fairly simple process and a great temporary solution for this. Here’s a step-by-step guide: 1. Head to the Speechmatics website – To use your Speechmatics credits, head to www.speechmatics.com and login to your account. Under “What do you want to do?”, choose “Transcription” and select the language of your file. 2. Upload your media file to the Speechmatics website – Speechmatics will give you the option to drag and drop or select your media from a folder on your computer. Choose whatever option works best for you and then click on “Upload”. After the file is uploaded, the transcription will start automatically and you can check the status of the transcription on your “Jobs” list. 3. Download a .JSON file – After the transcription is finished (refresh the page if the status doesn’t change automatically!), click on the Actions icon to access the transcript. You will then have the option to export the transcript as a .JSON file 4. Import the .JSON file into any version of Transcriptive – Open your Transcriptive panel in Premiere. If you are usingTranscriptive 2.0, be sure Clip Mode is turned on. Select the clip you have just transcribed on Speechmatics and click on “Import”. If you are using an older version of Transcriptive, drop the clip into a sequence before choosing “Import”. You will then have the option to “Choose an Importer”. Select the JSON option and import the Speechmatics file saved on your computer. The transcript will be synced with the clip automatically at no additional charge. One important thing to know is that, although Transcriptive v1.x still have Speechmatics as an option and it still works, we would still recommend following the steps above to transcribe with Speechmatics credits. The option available in these versions of the panel is an older version of their API and less accurate than the new version. So we recommend you transcribe on the Speechmatics website if you want to use your Speechmatics credits now and not wait for them to be transferred. However, we should have the transfer sorted out very soon, so keep an eye open for an email about it if you have Speechmatics credits. If the email address you use for Speechmatics is different than the one you use for Transcriptive.com, please email cs@digitalanarchy.com. We want to make sure we get things synced up so the credits go to the right place!
Adobe Premiere 14.0.2 and Transcriptive: What You Need to Know
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)
