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Sunday, October 9, 2011

Transcribing Interviews for Your Final Edit---The Importance of Details

It has never been more important to make sure your interviews are properly transcribed to paper before making your selects for sound-bites while post producing a documentary.  Finding a good company that can transcribe interviews you've conducted on tape is both challenging but essential.  You will need to find a reputable company that can take an interview from your master tape or MP4 file and handle the format properly so they can work on listening to the interviews you have conducted and then transcribe them to a WORD file or some other text format so you can print them up and compile them into your master edit production bible notebook.  Once you locate a reputable company, ( we've used paralegal assistance from law firms who charge a nominal fee for issuing a transcript from your master interview tapes with time-coded location of each sound-bite placed into the document so you can find them easier when you begin your edit plan on paper ) you're on the road to establishing a concise edit plan that will be helpful to you in the future for reference purposes and legal reasons just in case any of what you place into your documentary is ever questioned in court.  This is particularly helpful if you're producing an investigative piece or some kind of in depth expose that might come up questionable later on after your documentary is produced.  I can't begin to emphasize how helpful transcriptions of interviews are.  I'm still trying to find software that can do this for you similar to an Apple Dragon program that recognizes voice commands and transcribes it to text but there hasn't been any kind of software that I've yet discovered that will do the work for you without a transcriber of some sort.  Good luck in your edit plan.  It's the bible of documentarians.
Jim

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