Humans and Machines - Page 2
Hey machines, make it easy on humans, ok?
There are lots of things in filmmaking that are scary-exhilarating, and others that are scary-tedious, like making transcriptions. After I do an interview for a film, I have to hire somebody to listen to the interview and write down every word, or I have to do it myself. I use these transcripts in editing, going through them to pick out the best parts and making what's called a paper cut, which is as painful as it sounds, a crude estimation of what the film might look like by writing it out.
Philip Hodgetts and the people at Intelligent Assistance have changed all that. They gave me a copy of an application called prEdit to try out. prEdit uses Adobe's speech recognition engine to create a transcript. Your computer listens to the interview and types it out for you. If that weren't mind-blowing enough, you can then work with the written transcript in prEdit, selecting clips you like, tagging and logging, moving things around to shape the story, and then transferring that into Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere.
Bada-bing, you get a rough cut of your sequence.
Philip is obviously a genius, and prEdit rocks. I cut this sequence for my film The Incredible Power of Chance Events. Here's another that I haven't yet posted publicly. The newest version of prEdit permits you to rough in voice over narration so you can see and hear how sequences will play.
I think that's a good example of machines and people playing very nicely together.
Photo Credits: Mitch Altman via Creative Commons License and Intelligent Assistance.
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