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: “This is definitely the fastest transcription we’ve ever done.”

Taking and Sharing Notes on Video

InqScribe’s free-form text editing is intended to support a wide variety of tasks. So while we often talk of “transcribing” video, in practice oftentimes it’s more efficient to simply take notes. I was reminded of this in recent conversation with one of our customers at a cable tv network: sometimes all you want to do is review a clip and call out highlights from the video that you might want to use.

This is particularly useful in team environments: you can watch a video, insert a timecode and quick note about interesting moments, and then share the InqScribe document with your editor or director. The editor/director can click on the timecode to view the segment of video.

For example, we need to edit our introductory screencast. I review the video and I write the following in an InqScribe transcript to tell Matt (who’s editing the video):

Cut [00:00:06.00] through [00:00:14.23] -- we can jump straight into the intro.
The audio at [00:00:27.00] is unclear.  Can you re-record that?
End the clip at [00:01:06.03].

Matt already has the video on his computer, so I can just email the InqScribe file to him. He’ll copy it to the folder where the video is, open the InqScribe file, and the transcript will automatically link itself to the media again. (Alternatively, you can reference a common file on a network somewhere). He can then click on the timecodes I’ve inserted to see exactly what I”m talking about.

The “transcript” is only few lines, but it conveys everything he needs to know. And obviously, there’s no need for a line by line transcript. A few timecoded notes suffice.