Take 1 Transcription
by Ben Livingstone, Sound Recordist
It’s a minor point but I think I’m not alone in loathing audio cassettes and the semi domestic recorders that use them with their pop out connectors, poor channel isolation and insultive sonic quality. Unfortunately, transcript services don’t seem to share this opinion and so I find myself using my tired tape recorder all too often.
It is mainly the political shows I work on that want transcripts, partly for their edit and partly to feed to the press before airing on their very quick turn around, sometimes limited to hours. Often there is a motorcycle courier waiting to take these tapes as soon as we have cut, such is the pressure on time. This annoys me as a waste of money on couriers, money that could never find its way to us, an enforced use of flimsy technology that can barely handle timecode and it is clearly a grossly inefficient workflow.
You’ve probably predicted how this note ends as the solution is so clear to all of us, and you can imagine my delight (do I get out enough?) when I learnt that it would be a reality on the two week shoot (I have now finished). We recorded some 45 half hour interviews for a show called ‘Iraq Commission’ which was aired on Channel Four, and webcast. Given a head count of up to eight we decided it would be wise to record each microphone separately on an Aaton and we put the mix on the three Digibetas and a Sound Devices 744T.
In the few minutes that separated each interview I dragged a single channel of the mix off the Sound Devices onto my laptop to be uploaded to the transcript service. We quickly learnt that uploading 100MB wav files was not realistic on any internet connection we had access to, so I first passed them through BWF Widget, compressing them to MP3s of about 8MB. BWF Widget places the meta data into the MP3’s tag, thus the time stamp appears in the ‘artist’ field which can be viewed in any player or by simply hovering the mouse cursor over the file in Windows.
BWF Widget is setup for transcribers providing a player that can display timecode even for the MP3s that it created, and automatically putting timecode onto the clipboard when playback is paused, a thoughtful feature that I can only hope is exploited. Once compressed, I uploaded the track to the transcribers’ FTP site using Cute FTP, thus 15 minutes into the next interview they were already able to start transcribing down in Kent, please let’s not challenge a motorcycle courier to beat that.
Clearly I’m not writing this to tell you how to do it, more to reassure you that there is at least one transcription service in the 21st century and we can forget about audio cassettes. I think the main thing stopping this from working is the lack of realisation, amongst producers, that this is a possibility, surprising perhaps since it could save them time and money. I hope it saves you from audio cassettes.
This article was written by Ben Livingstone, Location Sound Recordist.
Contact details:
- Ben Livingstone: 07958 311 480
- Take 1 Transcription: 0800 0854418
- www.take1.tv
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