audio to text

Premiere has a feature where you can import a video clip and it analyzes it.
It will transcribe to text, the video's audio track.
Once done, you can then find a word in the text field and then the playhead will jump to that spot.

Does anyone know of a plugin for FCPX that can do similar?

thanks
Kurt

There is a program called Boris Soundbite. It's actually a standalone application that works (interacts) with FCP X. It does scan the audio tracks and creates an index that is searchable, viewable and can reference the clips back in FCPX. I've experienced a couple of issues working with the current version 2.1 but Boris support has been helpful - which is a plus.

thanks!
Ill check it out

One note: it's a $295 program, so not cheap. There is a free trial I think.

I just tried it on a fcpxml but it never finds anything..
What it is searching is the project file.. in that project is just multicam
I wonder if it dont work on multicam?
I tried one of the clips that the multicam was made from (pointed it to a folder where I copied the clip out) and it worked.
Getting the xml to go is the trick however... I have 3 TB of media to look at..

Any ideas?

thanks
Kurt

Just FYI the Speech-to-Text feature of Premiere has been dropped because, in all honesty, it never worked as it should.

www.philiphodgetts.com/2014/11/useful-speech-to-text-is-hard/

- Ronny

I had a similar problem in the beginning using Soundbite. Eventually, after contacting Boris support, I found that if I added the folder which contained the FCPX library I was interested in indexing then it worked. I don't know exactly why this would have to be the case - the instructions say that you just need to import an Event XML and Soundbite will index it - but it did work for me that way.

Still it was a little kludgy.

thanks, thats what i am trying now.. but its 3TB so it will take a while..

maybe thats why also I am only seeing one project (i exported out the library and events as well.. there should be a dozen or so projects..)

anyway Ill wait till the indexing is done

I am indexing the folder where I get files to import.. I will try to index the fcp bundle as well..

I'd be really interested to hear how it works out for you. I got Soundbite and tested it a bit after I had finished editing a documentary and thought about using next time I had a project with lots of material that needed to be transcribed. I haven't had the occasion to use it on current project yet.

Boris support claims the indexing happens at 10X speed of the clips - I can't verify this - I just know that it seemed to take a long time, longer that I expected.

so far, working with midia directly, in folders, it seems OK and can find alot that i type in, and the talker has an accent as well.

but what i really need is for it to export markers back into fcpx
not too sure what happens yet, but id like to see the project open in fcpx with markers on the clip or timeline...

otherwise id need to export out full clips with the markers.. too much.. i'd be better off in that case just searching myself..



Ronny, Premiere cc 8 still has the speach to text, its in the medadata area...

You git me wondering myself, so I'm doing a test with Soundbite now. I still can't get it to index an XML by just adding it to the Final Cut Projects list however I can get it to work by adding a folder to the Watched Folders list - have no idea why.

Soundbite's documentation claims in will create an XML with markers that you can import back into FCPX - I see if that happens.

Hi Kurt,

Yes it is, but Adobe has announced they are going to withdraw it. It is not reliable enough.

- Ronny

I sent a support question in to boris about this, explaining it all, but because i am using the trial, not sure if they'll answer me or not..

They did respond to me , and follow-up several times, when I was evaluating the trial. I hope you have the same experience.

Meantime, I am running a test on a folder that is 234 Gb's and Soundbite says that is it 7% indexed - it's been working for 18 minutes so far.

mine is about a 1/3 rd done
I cant tell yet with the export markers (because i cant do a project yet) but it would be nice if you can change the marker names..

I have many video for example that say protocol..
so if i could change the marker name to protocol 15, for example, then have that be the name when fcpx sees the marker..

Hi,

FYI there was this post about Boris Soundbite :
www.fcp.co/fcp-forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/19006-scriptsync

From what I tried, it seems Soundbite doesn't interpret many informations from fcpxml :
- Clips in Soundbite appear with finder names, even if you renamed them within FCPX, making difficult to report results in FCPX Event.
- Soundbite can’t analyze synchronized clips and multicam clips, but only source clips...
- Roundtrip never worked for me. Like you said, you have to manually add a watch folder, and manually match Soundbite results with FCPX event...

And it’s been a while since it hasn’t been updated. So while I would be very interested by the software, I didn’t buy it...

Fabien

Also wished for something like this on a doc project I just cut. No transcriptions were done and it would have been helpful to have at least a rough idea of what people talked about.

Ronny, I remember when Adobe touted this as an incredible new feature... and it just doesn't work. I'm more ticked off by software that promises one thing and doesn't actually work than anything else these days.

fcpguru wrote: ...I remember when Adobe touted this as an incredible new feature... and it just doesn't work...

I tried it several times and it definitely didn't work well for speaker-independent speech-to-text. However a key use Adobe promoted was for scripted narratives where you have a textual script -- it would do better at synchronizing spoken word to the existing script.

For documentaries, there's definitely a need for speaker-independent, untrained speech-to-text. There is a web service called www.voicebase.com . Their lowest end version used to be free but it's not now. I don't know what their prices are but when I tested VoiceBase last year it was fairly decent. It's obviously not integrated with the editor but could be useful in some circumstances.

Here are some empirical results after spending time today testing Boris Soundbite 2.1. First off, I could never successfully get Soundbite to index an FCP X (10.1.4) exported Event xml despite following the directions in the documentation. However, the software could successfully index the entire contents of a "Watched Folder" that contained a FCP Library and media. Soundbite's documentation says that any folders that are designated "watched folders" will be automatically indexed (and updated) with any projects contained therein. I can't confirm the update function works at this time.

After initiating the indexing - it took about 3.5 hours to index a 234Gb folder on a Pegasus R6 drive connected to my Mac Pro - I could search for any words and Soundbite returned positive hits. I can toggle on a preview of the footage and I see blue markers in the preview timeline. As you can see from the attached screenshot the number of hits is listed (e.g. college=5 hits) but many multiple (and seemingly redundant) instances of the same film name

listed in the results too. Not sure what to make of this.

Soundbite could export an xml of the results that I did import into FCP X as a new event. Markers were attached to the appropriate hit portions of the clips. So that did work.

My impression after this ad hoc test is that Soundbite still feels a little unstable overall. Maybe an update will help.

Thank you for testing this. Very interesting.

- Ronny