charity: water

We’re proud to be sponsors of charity: water.  InqScribe’s ability to support transcriptions and subtitles in multiple languages make it ideally suited for work in the field, especially for organizations such as charity: water that rely on story telling.  Here’s how they describe their work:

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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.

Guest Blog: Using InqScribe with Final Cut Pro and multiple languages

InqScribe’s ability to export transcripts to Final Cut Pro has made it particularly useful for documentary filmmakers working in multiple languages.  In this latest guest blog, part of our ongoing series highlighting how folks use InqScribe, Carlos Sandoval, an award-winning filmmaker, talks about how they’re using it with their latest project.

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

Second language learning using films

A part of our occasional series highlighting interesting uses of InqScribe

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.

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!

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:

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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.