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Filed under: Interactive •Post Production •Web Video •

Speech Search Meets ScriptSync

Syncing the script with Script Sync

In Avid, to import the script for ScriptSync, you choose File>New Script. This brings you to a dialog box where you are allowed to browse and bring in one script at a time. When each script is imported, they look kind of like little Applescript icons in your bin, but they function just like a regular bin. Opening one of them will reveal the text of your transcript and a series of controls at the top.

To link the words in the script to the words in the clip:

1. Select the portion of the script that correlates to a specific clip. Lasso all the words that are in the clip.
2. Drag and drop the clip onto the selected clip. This links that text to the clip.
3. Now for the real magic: click on the small square at the bottom center of the thumbnail that is now next to the text and choose Script > ScriptSync. Very quickly the Avid associates all of the words in the text with their exact location in the clip.

So, similar to Adobe Speech Search, you can click on a word in the text and the correct clip for that word will load into the source monitor and place the timeline locator and an inpoint at the exact location of the selected word.

This is an amazingly fast way to navigate around. You can even use Command+F (Mac) or Control+F (Wintel) to instantly find any word in your transcript. Hitting Find again will jump to the next instance of the word in the transcript.

You can even color code sections of the script, possibly equating each color with the theme or idea or person or subject.

Once you find your shots using ScriptSync, the editing process is the same as usual. There are a lot more things to know about using ScriptSync with traditional “Hollywood” scripts and film making processes, but this is about all you need to know for documentary-type transcription scripts.

To see Avid’s video tutorials of ScriptSync in action, check out the following links:

http://www.avid.com/scriptsync/scriptSync_1.html
http://www.avid.com/scriptsync/scriptSync_2.html
http://www.avid.com/scriptsync/scriptSync_3.html

Skipping ScriptSync

The ScriptSync part of the equation here is really only needed if you want to edit in the Avid. If you are cool editing in Premiere Pro, then there are advantages to using the Speech Search feature to search through your clips. By staying in Adobe the whole time, or at least staying there once you’ve done the Speech Search process, you maintain the metadata of all of that transcribed text.

That metadata - to an editor - is really only good for finding the word you want quickly and using it to set your in and out points. But to a WEB person, it’s valuable, because Adobe tracks all of those words in the clips even AFTER they’re edited into a video and the faces are covered with b-roll and even AFTER they’re exported into one giant exported file and even AFTER they’re compressed and even AFTER they’re sent off to the web.

Why should you care? Because all of those words in your documentary or marketing video or whatever are SEARCHABLE via the web. Someday soon, hopefully Google and Yahoo will be able to search on those words embedded in your videos, but for now you can access them through a tool from Adobe. If you maintain your own website, or your client maintains their own website, then people on those sites can actually search for specific words in finished, edited pieces on those websites! How cool is that!

Check out this website that shows the concept. Just type a word that you’re looking for and you’ll see the sentence that includes the word and a yellow marker appears in the timeline showing where the word is in the video.

There’s also a piece here on ProVideoCoalition about this searchable video.

You can download the code to include in a website so that it can search Adobe-created videos. For some, this would be a powerful incentive for using Adobe to edit. You can also get this benefit by editing your video elsewhere and only doing the Speech Search on a finished edit. As long as the video stays in PremierePro between the Speech Search process and the export to the web, the video will be searchable by Adobe’s engine.

So that’s it! Lot’s of sweet, chocolatey goodness mixed with plenty of creamy peanut buttery love.

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