Hi, I am Jo and today I am going to be looking at some top technical tips
for online transcriptionists and subtitlers.
As anyone who has ever tried writing subtitles or transcribing a video knows,
even with the best software, the process can be incredibly time consuming.
Add to your normal work time codes, specific template styles and research
into spellings and jargon and some jobs that should have taken hours
can wind up taking days.
As someone with ten years of experience within the transcription industry knows,
here are some tips to hopefully improve the speed and quality of your work.
Offsetting time codes.
This first tip covers how to offset the time code on an Express Scribe file.
It can come in handy if you are dealing with a video production
company who are looking to have transcription of rushes or subtitles
made through using time coded transcription.
There may be an onscreen time code that displays that relates to the
time code that was on their cameras, and they may want this time code to
line up rather than starting with zero as Express Scribe typically does.
So what you would need to do is load up your audio in Express Scribe and
you right click on the file.
Go to Dictation Information.
Time Offset.
And so we will say the time code should start from one hour in.
You would simply put the time here, okay it and as you can see,
the time code has been nicely offset.
System-Wide Hot Keys
As any transcriptionist who deals with a lot of time coded files and subtitles knows,
inserting time codes manually is incredibly impractical.
Sometimes time codes are requested for time coded transcripts as often
as a time code every sentence, a time code every 30 seconds
or a time code every minute.
And putting in this many time codes manually can take a lot of time.
So using the System-Wide Hot Keys is a great way of doing this quickly,
and I will show you how to do it now.
So you go to Options on Express Scribe, and System-Wide Hot Keys.
Now, here you can add a key to assign a function to.
So what we have here is we have a command that can open Express Scribe.
What we want to do is we want to change the hot key here.
Press a key or key combination.
I always use F1 for inserting a time code, so here we go.
First of all, this will come up but We are going to change that.
So the F1 key was before opening up Express Scribe.
What we now want it to do is to copy time here.
So you select Copy Time, okay that.
You can see it is added along here and then you okay it.
So we can remember that we used F1 as the copy time function and we can
use CTRL + V to paste each time code into the transcript.
Pedable Software
Pedable is a really useful software for transcriptionists and subtitlers
and what it does is it assigns keys on your keyboard to pedals on your
transcriptionist foot pedal.
And this is how it works.
You go into Pedable.
As you can see, you have pedals listed in the left hand column
so you have left, centre and right pedal.
You have the action along the centre and then whether or not it has been enabled.
To edit actions, here, we have ALT + C which is In Times, say for doing
a .SRT file on Subtitle Workshop.
You can right click, go to Edit Action.
Send Key Combination.
And you can change that to whatever you wanted.
So if I wanted to write subtitle file end times, then I would change
that to ALT + V and finish there.
Similarly, it can work with number pad numbers and it does differentiate
between those and the numbers along the top of your keyboard which means
it can be used with WINCAPS subtitle software which is pretty useful.
Also, it can be used for copy typing jobs or formatting, as you can set
the pedals to be CTRL + V or CTRL + C for copying and pasting,
which also saves time.
Be Flexible.
My final tip for online transcriptionists, subtitle writers
and closed caption writers is to be flexible in the way you work.
With new updates on software, new software being released and
regulations on broadcast, online and video subtitles always changing,
It is important to stay on top of things and be willing to learn.
So that is it for Capital Captions
Top Tips for Transcriptionists and Subtitlers Working Online.
Thanks for watching!