Documentary filmmakers: Do you transcribe your footage?

[zacjotengine]

Hi, everyone.

Quick disclosure - I work for a transcription service, but I'm not trying to promote, so I won't link the site

I was having a discussion with a filmmaker friend of mine, who told me that one of the major pain points documentary filmmakers have is that they need to transcribe hours and hours of footage, then categorize it and organize it before they can really start to put together a cohesive script and narrative.

Is this a standard practice for documentarians? If so - do you ever use a transcription service? And if not, why not?

Would love to hear your thoughts and learn a thing or two.

Cheers,

Zac

 

[gorillaonabike]

Hi, everyone.

Quick disclosure - I work for a transcription service, but I'm not trying to promote, so I won't link the site

I was having a discussion with a filmmaker friend of mine, who told me that one of the major pain points documentary filmmakers have is that they need to transcribe hours and hours of footage, then categorize it and organize it before they can really start to put together a cohesive script and narrative.

Is this a standard practice for documentarians? If so - do you ever use a transcription service? And if not, why not?

Would love to hear your thoughts and learn a thing or two.

Cheers,

Zac

Am not using a transcription service because I like to find a cheap runner to do it. At the moment, the last cheap runner nearly burned a house down, blew the fuses and therefore am doing it myself.

Tell me about costs and the nature of the service.

 

[zacjotengine]

Sure thing.

We offer a flat fee - $1 / minute of content, delivered in two days for each hour of content. So, 2 hours of content would cost $120 and be delivered within four days (usually, we deliver much sooner).

We don't charge extra for timestamps (those are included roughly every two minutes, wherever makes sense) or difficult audio or multiple speakers or any of that nonsense, and all of our transcripts are "clean verbatim" - meaning we do not include the "ums", "ahs", false starts, etc.

You can have your transcript delivered as a Google document or accessible in our pad: https://www.jotengine.com/t/demo

If you don't want to pay for a service, we offer a 100% free web-app that makes manual transcription a lot less painful: https://www.jotengine.com/diy

Your runners and interns might find the above especially useful -- seriously, we use it every day, and it makes our lives much easier

Cheers,

Zac