Guest Blog: Using InqScribe for a Documentary on Native American Health

We just love it when InqScribe is put to use for a worthy cause. As part of our ongoing series that highlights how our folks are using the tool, we’ve invited Kitty Farmer of Watersong Productions to tell us about her advocacy work for Native Americans, and how InqScribe helped streamline her workflow.

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

What’s In The Heart

By Kitty Farmer, Watersong Productions, LLC

I am an advocate/activist who is new to filmmaking. My first experience with transcribing was starting and stopping the DVD player on my computer! As anyone can imagine, this was laborious, tedious and took forever. Last summer, a colleague recommended Inquirum’s amazing software. After spending time with the product, I can say in all honesty, I love to transcribe! It’s truly a remarkable product. My director, Dustinn Craig, White Mountain Apache, who has had several films broadcast on PBS, was thrilled to learn about it when we spent time together filming this last weekend.

Photo credit: Alejandro Lopez

We use InqScribe to log our video footage, especially to transcribe interviews. The director uses these transcripts to make edit decisions. During editting, we use the timecodes embedded in the transcripts to be able to quickly jump to clips we want to review.

Leonard Little Finger, Photo © Deanne Fitzmaurice

We are producing a 20-minute trailer to Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT) for a grant to create a documentary film to educate the general public and policy makers about the history and reasons why American Indians, despite treaties with the U.S. government that mandate basic social services, have the worst health disparities of any population in the nation. In addition, we highlight some remarkable people who through their resiliency and ingenuity have created programs and initiatives that are healing their communities. The film is sponsored by the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board (formerly the Aberdeen Area Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board).

Help see the film finished: contribute on Indie Go Go

Film Web Site: What’s in the Heart

What’s in the Heart from Kitty Farmer on Vimeo.

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Kitty Farmer

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 and 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.