How Transcripts Help the Post-Production Process

Having full transcripts of the audio and/or video that you’ve collected during your project research stage can be immensely helpful in the post-production process.

Transcripts have a number of vital uses that can both speed up and simplify the editing process, making them a crucial element for any post-production team.

If you are a video editor facing the many challenges during the post-production stage, then take a look at how transcripts can help the process.

Reduces Editing Time with Synched Time Stamps

Professional audio to text transcriptions, like the ones you can get with Happy Scribe, allow you to add custom time stamps where you want in the text.

Having these timestamps sync up with the time codes in the original video can vastly speed up the video editing process.

Imagine this scenario. Your producer wants to cut several sections of footage to reduce the length of the production. They could provide comments by switching between viewing or listening to the raw footage and the editing footage, but this will could potentially take hours.

With a transcript, every speaker change or scene change can easily be identified with a timestamp. The producer can then simply make comments on the text about which segments they want to include or discard, making it easy for the video editor to execute.

The result is a much simpler way of providing comments, which in turn creates greater efficiency during the post-production stage.

Facilitates Efficient Team Collaboration

A lot of video post-production happens across a team of people. Collaboration happens all the time, from determining what interview clips to include, to what scenes to delete to crafting the overall story.

Having a professional transcript can help. Usually external providers will host your transcribed text on an external web platform, where your text and video or audio can be viewed simultaneously. A provider, like Happy Scribe for Teams, can allow you to easily share the transcription text and video or audio with others via link or email. Once inside the platform, each individual can then easily watch the video or listen to the audio, highlight relevant text, communicate ideas, insert timestamps, and provide comments in one centralized document.

Having all feedback in one place, where all changes are auto-saved, reduces the need for cross referencing of Word Documents and eliminates the need for downloading of files. This helps everyone in the post-production process to be on the same page. Literally. The result is a streamlined, efficient team collaboration process.

Creates Accurate Subtitles and Captions

Transcripts are also incredibly useful if you decide to add subtitles to your video, which we highly recommend if you plan to post your production on Facebook or YouTube.

With the text already there, all you simply need to do is copy and paste. There is no need for additional listening to what has been said and typing it out.

This is just another way that transcripts can speed up the post-production process.

Simplifies Translations

What happens if you decide translate your production into several different languages?

If you have a finalized transcript already to hand, this can simply be handed over to the translators for the various languages you need. The outcome is a quicker and more efficient process.

Easily Extends Your Content

Repurposing your popular content in new ways is a vital to extending the life of your project as well as extending the reach of your audience.

Having a high-quality transcript of your audio or video makes it easier to share across other mediums and to be used as a basis to create other types of content.

Depending on the content, you can use your transcription text to develop a blog article, create an infographic, group like content together as an e-book, develop snippets for social media posts, or build an engaging e-mail newsletter.

Scanning transcription text is much easier than watching hundreds of video hours, to find interesting content that might be great for reformatting, recycling, and re-promoting your content through different mediums.

As you can see, there are a number of ways that having professional transcripts of your audio and video can help the post-production process, saving you production time and ultimately reducing your budget too!