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Photo by charity: water

In 2006, we followed women in Ethiopia to a tepid water hole, where they filtered muddy liquid through their headscarves into a Jerry can. They hauled more than 40 pounds of this water on their backs to take home to their families. This is the only drinking water they had and they had to make it work for cleaning their homes, cooking, and unfortunately- drinking.

We filmed this. We shared their stories to show what millions of people in developing countries do each and every day. The response was overwhelming.

Fast forward five years and we’ve funded more than 4,200 water projects around the world to serve over two million people with clean water. Why? Because we’ve stuck to telling honest and beautiful stories from people living through the water crisis. As a result, thousands have joined our mission by donating or fundraising alongside us.

Each story we tell empowers giving as we return and share it with those willing to help… but we currently do all of our post-production work with very little equipment. Since we’re shooting in places that require a great deal of translation and subtitles, we also need to do a lot of transcribing.

InqScribe’s software allows us to quickly transcribe in one program — instead of having to toggle back and forth between a video and an excel spreadsheet. Not only that, the shortcut controls allow us to customize each document, thereby streamlining our editing process. Speeding up our post production only makes us more efficient in sharing stories that need to be heard.

Thank you for your time and all you do to improve video storytelling.

Got an interesting story about how you’re using InqScribe? Please contact us at info@inquirium.net if you’d like to highlight your work.

The Arizona Project

We are currently working on a feature documentary tentatively titled THE ARIZONA PROJECT. The film takes on Arizona’s current struggle with illegal immigration and presents it from all sides of the issue: from the perspective of the recent immigrants, to that of native Arizonans who are seeing their communities change. Because we are dealing with material in both English and Spanish, InqScribe has been invaluable for our editorial and post production tasks.

InqScribe allows us to quickly and easily access our footage and to create time code specific documents that will reference said footage. This allows us to best isolate the material that will shape our story. We can create transcriptions of our interviews in English, and translations of those in Spanish. Even more importantly, we can create subtitles in InqScribe that quickly and easily get imported into Final Cut Pro saving us (literally) hours and hours of time. This versatility is instrumental for a project like ours.

Thank you for making such a great product and for helping to bridge the gap between Spanish and English speakers. I wish we’d have had InqScribe when we were working on our award-winning film, Farmingville.

Carlos Sandoval

Camino Bluff Productions, Inc.
752 West End Ave., 2F | New York, NY 10025
p. 212 666 3266 | f. 212 864 4313
mail@caminobluff.com | www.CaminoBluff.com

In addition to transcriptionists and documentary filmmakers, researchers make up a large portion of InqScribe users.  Although, in this case, we hit two of our favorite topics simultaneously: research and education.

Alex Gilmore, a professor at the University of Tokyo, just published a book chapter on using InqScribe to produce film-based teaching resources based for second language learning.

Why film?  Think about it, wouldn’t you rather learn a language by watching a film than reading boring text or hokey audio tapes? Films are a naturally motivating platform for teaching language. They’re also useful because they have contextual and discourse features like colloquial language, politeness strategies, and vague language that make them valuable for developing listening skills. They represent a much more authentic use of language.

Why not just use the subtitles present in many DVDs? Subtitles are actually often condensed versions of what is actually said. In language learning, it’s important to have the full text. So you have to take the time to produce quality learning materials.

In the chapter, Professor Gilmore details a procedure in which he uses InqScribe to produce teaching materials for an episode of Fawlty Towers, a British comedy television series. This includes subtitles as well as classroom materials. He covers ripping from DVD all the way to producing subtitles, so it’s a pretty thorough tutorial.

He’s generously provided a PDF of the chapter. You can download the paper here.

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Gilmore, A. (2009). Catching words: Exploiting film discourse in the foreign language classroom. In F. Mishan & A. Chambers (eds.), Perspectives on Language Learning Materials Development. Oxford: Peter Lang AG.

Stacy Bick of Rochtester Institute of Technology has put together a really nice series of videos to introduce subtitling with InqScribe for the Deaf community. Actually it’s a pretty complete set of video tutorials that anyone might find useful.

Here is the main video tutorial page (Unfortunately, this is just a list of the latest videos, so you may have to scroll down).

For your convenience, here is a list of all the videos:

1. Introduction
2. Interface Overview
3. Select Media File
4. Controllers and Shortcuts
5. Transcription and Snippets
6. Proof Checking
7. Export Movie from InqScribe
8. Enable/Disable Subtitle Display
9. Export Only Subtitles to FCP
10. Modify Existing Transcript Timecode
11. Conclusion

Thanks, Stacy!

To highlight how our folks are using the tool, we would like to do an occasional feature where we invite our users to be guest bloggers.

Here’s our first guest blog from a pair of award-winning documentary filmmakers. We were particularly interested in how they might be using InqScribe as part of their translation and transcription workflow, so we asked them to elaborate:

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DigAllMedia

By Dianne Griffin and Erica Jordan

Digall Media, a 501(c)(3) organization founded by Erica Jordan and Dianne Griffin is currently in production on their one-hour documentary Painted Nails – a Vietnamese immigrant story of exotic nail art, pampered clients, and the serious health risks that lurk beneath the brightly painted surface.

We’re excited about using Inquirium’s product InqScribe to transcribe dialogue and create English subtitles for our Vietnamese and Spanish speaking characters. We’re still fine-tuning the workflow of importing subtitles, generated with InqScribe, into Final Cut Pro. It took some time to figure out the importing and exporting specs, but it was worth trouble-shooting. We can now transcribe dialogue in InqScribe with timecode, export it as an XML file using a custom FCP XML template. When the XML file is imported into Final Cut, the subtitles (as text elements) magically appear on a new timeline. InqScribe’s support page offers to look at your files to help trouble-shoot subtitling issues. InqScribe works great with a foot pedal, saving valuable post-production time.

Filmmaking is hard enough; it’s great to find a product such as InqScribe to make it easier.

Please contact us at info@inquirum.net if you’re interested in highlighting your work.

If you’re using Final Cut Pro 7 and importing InqScribe-generated FCP XML files, you’re probably pulling your hair out. As of FCP7, any imported subtitles beyond the two minute mark show up with a duration of only one frame.

The problem is twofold. First, InqScribe is setting incorrect values for the in and out points for each generated subtitle. In prior versions of FCP, these values were essentially ignored on import, because in and out points for a static subtitle don’t really mean that much. (The start and end points for the subtitle, which determine where the subtitle goes in the sequence, were and are correct.)

Unfortunately, FCP7 is interpreting those values differently, and any subtitle with an in point greater than the subtitle’s stated duration ends up with a frame length of 1. Since InqScribe was setting every subtitle’s duration to 3600 frames (because this value shouldn’t really matter: effective duration of the subtitle is based on the start and end values), most users will find that subtitles that start at the two minute mark or later are affected.

We’re working on a fix for the next beta release. In the meantime, there is a workaround.

Here’s an excerpt from an InqScribe-generated FCP XML file:

<generatoritem id="Text">
    <name>Text</name>
    <duration>3600</duration>
    <rate>
        <ntsc>TRUE</ntsc>
        <timebase>30</timebase>
    </rate>
    <in>7540</in>
    <out>7610</out>
    <start>7540</start>
    <end>7610</end>

Note that InqScribe sets the duration to 3600 (regardless of the actual duration, which is based on the start and end values). InqScribe also sets the in and out points to the start and end values. The problem is that in and out values should technically never be greater than the duration.

So the fix is to change every instance of in and out to this:

<in>100</in>
<out>3600</out>

With this change, in and out stay within duration’s range, and FCP7 won’t clip the resulting subtitle.

To make this change easily, use a tool that supports regular expressions to find all instances of the in and out tags. Here’s a solution that uses sed, which comes installed on OS X.

1. Export the FCP XML file from InqScribe as usual (let’s say it’s called export.xml).
2. In the Terminal, navigate to the directory containing export.xml, and issue this command (which is one long line, make sure to copy the whole thing):

sed -e 's_\(<in>\)[0-9]*\(</in>\)_\1100\2_g' -e 's_\(<out>\)[0-9]*\(</out>\)_\13600\2_g' < export.xml > export_fixed.xml

3. Import the resulting export_fixed.xml into FCP7.

If you want to dig into sed so you understand what that command is doing, here’s a solid sed tutorial. It’s a very powerful tool.

The bug is that InqScribe is counting the dropped frames when it converts from the timecode to a single frame count number. As a result, the converted time codes will drift farther and farther from where they should be, the later in the movie you go.

There is a workaround that you can use until we fix the problem.

Update: turns out the workaround didn’t work. Drat. But the good news is that we’ve fixed the underlying problem in InqScribe 2.1. A public beta can be found here.

This fix takes advantage of the fact that the conversion from non-DF time code to a frame number works fine in InqScribe, and actually lines up with what the DF value should be. The tricky part is getting FCP to recognize the imported XML as DF.

It goes like this:

1. Export from FCP a non-DF XML template for InqScribe.

2. Export FCP XML from InqScribe using the template.

Since InqScribe notices that the template is non-DF, it’ll convert based on that time code format, which we know will actually line up with what you want.

3. Open the exported XML file in a text editor and do a global search and replace as follows.

FCP XML notes time code format like this:

<rate>
  <ntsc>FALSE</ntsc>
  <timebase>30</timebase>
</rate>

If the value for <ntsc> is TRUE, it uses DF. If it’s FALSE, it uses non-DF.

So, if you replace “<ntsc>FALSE” with “<ntsc>TRUE”, you’re essentially converting the XML file to DF, which what you want. Remember to do a replace all — there will be tons of <rate> bundles throughout the XML file.

4. Import the modified XML into your project.

If all goes well, FCP will decide this is a proper DF import, and you’ll see all the time codes line up.