InqScribe News

InqScribe training videos for Deaf community

We have a fair number of users in the Deaf community who use InqScribe to transcribe and subtitle videos.

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!

Tip: Inserting a time code with “Enter” key

Problem: You want to insert time stamps in your transcript at regular intervals without having to explicitly insert a time code.

Solution 1: The easiest way to do this is to define a shortcut for your Enter key. Here’s how:

1. Open your transcript in InqScribe
2. Select the “Edit” menu->”Edit Snippets…”
3. Click the “Add” button to add a new snippet.
4. Click on “Define Trigger” button.
5. Hit “Enter” to define your “Enter” key as the trigger. And then click OK.
6. Edit the Snippet text:
6a. First, insert a carriage return by clicking to the left of the default snippet text “{$TIME} Speaker Name” and hitting “Enter”
6b. Delete “Speaker Name” from the text.

Now whenever you hit “Enter” InqScribe will insert a carriage return followed by a time code.

Solution 2: If you just need to insert time codes into your transcript at regular intervals, you can also use the Insert Time Series method. Please see this for more instructions: http://blogs.inquirium.net/inqscribe/2011/02/2-1-tip-lay-down-a-time-code-every-30-seconds/

2.1 Tip: How to lay down a time code every 30 seconds

New in version 2.1 of InqScribe: You can insert time code series, e.g. “lay down a time code every 30 seconds,” like this:

[00:00:00.00]
[00:00:30.00]
[00:01:00.00]
[00:01:30.00]
[00:02:00.00]
[00:02:30.00]

This is typically used by transcriptionists who need to sync text with the video every n seconds. So you start with an empty transcript, insert the time codes, then begin transcription.

You can insert time series by:

1. Start InqScribe
2. Create a new transcript
3. Select “Edit” menu->”Insert Time Series…”
4. Enter the number of seconds you want between each time code, start and end times, and optionally a line break or text after each time code.
5. Click “Insert”

…and transcribe away!

Download version 2.1 here: http://www.inqscribe.com/download.html

Background pedal support: Not quite there yet

One of the features that we really wanted to get into version 2.1 is support for using foot pedals (and other USB input devices) to control media playback while InqScribe is in the background. This would let users stay in their favorite application like Word or FileMaker, but still be able to control media playback during transcription.

Background support was present in the 2.1 betas, and we had updated the documentation to reflect this. But we made a decision very late in the 2.1 release cycle, after QA showed that some brands of foot pedals were not functioning properly in the background, to pull the feature until we could get it right.

Unfortunately, while we pulled the feature, we did not pull the related documentation, so if you read the documentation for 2.1 you may wonder where the magical “Control Media in Background” option is.

We’re working hard to restore that option as soon as we resolve the issues with some foot pedals. In the meantime, the feature does exist in the latest 2.1 beta, which you are welcome download and try (although you may run into the same QA issues that we did). [Update 2011-05-11: Sorry, we've since removed the beta due to QA issues.]

If you are interested in background foot pedal support, please contact us and let us know what kind of foot pedal you’re using, and we’ll let you know as soon as we have a resolution for this issue.

InqScribe 2.1 Released!

Happy New Year!

We just released version 2.1 of InqScribe!

• InqScribe can now insert time code series, e.g. “lay down a time code every 30 seconds”
• Improved support for Final Cut Pro users.
• Improved handling of backups and file recovery.
• And of course, a few bug fixes.

Read the release notes for more details.

InqScribe 2.1 is a free upgrade.

Download 2.1 now.

Tip: How do I remove frames from timecodes?

I don’t want the frame number to appear in my time code. I want [hh:mm:ss], not [hh:mm:ss:ff]. Can I turn it off?

For example, I don’t want my time code to look like this: [00:01:23.29]
Instead, I want to remove the last two numbers so it looks like this: [00:01:23]

—

To remove the frames from your currently open transcript:

1. Open the existing transcript in InqScribe.

2. Select “Transcript->Transcript Settings…” from the menu bar.

3. Under the “Inserted Time Code Format:” section, check the “Omit Frames” checkbox.

4. Click “OK” to close the window.

This will tell InqScribe not to use frames in the future for this particular transcript (Frames will still be used by default for any new transcripts that you create.  See the next section to turn off frames for all future transcripts). Next we need to remove the frames from your existing time codes.

5. Select “Transcript->Adjust Time Codes…” from the menu bar.

6. Leave the “Adjustment:” field at “00:00:00″, and click “Adjust.”  This will reformat all of your time codes to remove the frame number.

—

To change ALL of your future transcripts to omit frames by default…

(You can always enable frames on a per transcript basis. This will just disable them by default for any new transcript you create.)

…On a Mac:

1. Select “InqScribe->Preferences…” from the menu bar.

2. Click on the “New Document” tab at the top of the “InqScribe Preferences” window.

3. Under the “Inserted Time Code Format:” section, check the “Omit Frames” checkbox.

…On Windows:

1. Select “Edit->Options…” from the menu bar.

2. Click on the “New Document” tab at the top of the “InqScribe Preferences” window.

3. Under the “Inserted Time Code Format:” section, check the “Omit Frames” checkbox.

Why the evaluation license window is shrinking

If you’ve requested an evaluation license for InqScribe recently, you may have noticed that we’re handing out licenses that expire January 1. That’s about three weeks away. Normally we give you guys licenses that are good for about 5-6 weeks.

There’s a reason for this: the set of evaluation licenses for InqScribe 2.0 are running out. We plan to release InqScribe 2.1 very soon, and once it’s out the 5-6 week evaluation license window will return.

We encourage everyone to request a new evaluation license for InqScribe 2.1, even if you’ve already asked for one for InqScribe 2.0. And version 2.1 will be a free update for all of our registered users.

Happy Holidays!

Modern Advertising Antics

I was tweaking our google adwords account for InqScribe when I came upon this site: transcriptionsoftwareformymac.com/.

And I thought “Cool! A review of InqScribe!”  The review was lukewarm, although they did raise some valid points. I wanted to clarify a few things so I started to look for someone to contact.

But there was no contact information. Hmm… that’s strange, usually someone writing a review normally wants to take credit for their work. Why are there no names?

So I did a little more poking around. transcriptionsoftwareformymac.com is registered to a Joshua Nozzi, and its domain servers use bartastechnologies.com.

Transcriva, of course, is an InqScribe competitor, and is a product of bartastechnologies.com, which is run by one Joshua Nozzi.

We’re happy to compare InqScribe on its merits against other transcription solutions. If Joshua wants to make those comparisons, that’s fine. But he ought to be willing to stand behind his work and not try to pass it off as a neutral review.

I should also point out that this raises significant doubts about the validity of that little “poll” Joshua is running on the blog.

As Phil Harvey used to say, now you know… the rest of the story.

Guest Blog: How documentary filmmakers transcribe and subtitle with InqScribe

InqScribe has many different kinds of users. But the majority of our users can be categorized into three groups: university researchers, professional transcriptionists, and documentary filmmakers.

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:

—

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.

New InqScribe video tutorials

InqScribe is so easy to use, who needs tutorials, right? Well, a little background can’t hurt, so we created four new introductory video tutorials that provide (1) a basic overview of InqScribe, (2) an introduction to shortcuts and snippets, (3) tips on using time codes, and (4) an introduction to subtitling. They’re all a part of our revamped home page.