With NAB 2017 now wrapped, I’ve had a chance to actually dive in and check out some of the “Tools for Editors” offerings from the different companies, and I thought I’d start out with a quick look at Scribeomatic from Coremelt. Scribeomatic is a cloud based transcription service that will let you take clips/audio from your FCPX project (rolls), upload them to the cloud, and receive back FCPX markers with all dialogue marked for easy access. What will also have the ability to do is to create “Storyboards”, via Scribeomatic, to then export and import “timelines” into directly into FCPX. This, for me, is a very interesting concept, especially with the re-introduction of PhraseFind for Media Composer editors just a little while ago. This is something that was attempted by Adobe a few years ago, and was dropped, as you can read below.
Starting with the December 2014 release of Premiere Pro CC (8.2), the Speech-to-Text feature or Speech Analysis functionality is removed from Premiere Pro CC.
The Speech Analysis functionality in Premiere Pro analyzes speech and converts spoken words into text-based, searchable metadata.
At the time of implementing Speech Analysis, it was anticipated that the underlying engine for this feature would improve at a faster rate than it did. Over time, user feedback and research confirm that this feature is not feasible to a degree of accuracy that is useful to users.
Given this focus, Speech Analysis is removed in Premiere Pro CC. That is, you can no longer analyze any new media and generate speech-to-text metadata in Premiere Pro CC.
This puts Coremelt in a very interesting situation. With PhraseFind, Avid has set the bar pretty high, as PhraseFind has been super accurate for me, and has become an essential part of my workflow. This is what Coremelt is striving for, for FCPX editors. Recently at NAB 2017’s LumaForge Faster Together Stage, Roger Bolton, CEO of Coremelt demoed Scribeomatic, and the demo was pretty impressive.
So, after watching that, let’s get the big questions out of the way first.
Pricing
As of right now, there is no pricing listed and this, for me, is the make or break component of Scribeomatic. No matter how cool it is, if you price it too high, and people won’t use it, but if you nickel and dime them with a per-use model, it will just annoy the end user. A good point of reference for Coremelt on this is that to purchase Media Composer’s Phrasefind option outright is $149 US.
Turn Around Time
During the demo, you saw Roger transcribe the clips in his event in real time, and according to Coremelt this will be possible “depending on your connection”. The other thing that is very relevant in the demo is that the audio was sourced from external audio, and not audio that came from the camera mic, so I’m assuming that what he was uploading to the cloud was audio only, but it was a little confusing. What does that mean if you have camera raw footage with final audio included. Will Scribeomatic upload only the audio for your clips? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Language Support
At launch, English will be the only language supported but, obviously, as the product moves along in development, the idea is to support other languages including Spanish, Italian, French, German and Japanese.
Release Date
As of right now, there is no release date listed, but I will be keeping a close eye on this product, as it’s one that I find very interesting.
With Apple snapping up talent like Wes Plate of Automatic Duck (NLE to Compositing workflow products), and Tim Dashwood of Dashwood Cinema Solutions (3D & VR in FCPX), Coremelt is taking steps to not only be a provider of VFX tools for FCPX editors, but a new tool to help editors speed up their workflow’s with cloud-based transcription and phrase/word finding. For more information, or to check out Coremelt’s entire product line, you can check them out at www.coremelt.com .