Media transcription involves creating a text form of the audio part, acts and/or the situation within a media program. As more and more TV shows, celebrity interviews, talk shows and other programs are being broadcast today, the transcription of audio visual media content has become a significant aspect of media industry.
As we all know, media content is being accessed by a vast majority of people across the world, thanks to globalization and the popularity of the Internet. An accurate and complete transcript is therefore very important to break the language barrier and eliminate the problems caused by different accents. The other crucial reasons are:
- Blind individuals use screen readers to understand the media content. Screen reader software uses audio output to interpret and read out loud, content such as transcripts, to the user.
- Hearing impaired individuals depend upon captions and transcripts to understand the media content.
- Transcripts are also used as a powerful tool to enhance online marketing and support SEO efforts (since search engines crawl text rather than video or audio).
Types of Media Transcription
The most widely used types of media transcription are as follows.
Interview Transcription
This involves transcribing interviews (one-to-one interviews, interviews with multiple participants), meetings, group discussions and conferences. A very high level of accuracy is very important for this type of transcription. You can generate transcripts in three different styles:
- True Verbatim – In this approach, everything uttered by the speakers is transcribed as such including every repeated word, every ‘um’ and ‘er,’ filler phrases, pauses, stutters, stammers and other sounds made (for example, throat clearing, cough).
- Intelligent Verbatim – This style is more expensive, which retains non-standardized language, but cuts out filler words, ‘um’ and ‘er’ (unless they are at the beginning followed by a long pause), repeated words (unless repeating the relevant word for emphasis), pauses, stutters, stammers and other sounds made.
- Edited – This is the most expensive style, which corrects the grammar and mispronounced words as well as eliminate all fillers, ‘um’ and ‘er’, repeated words, pauses, stutters, stammers and sounds.
Video Transcription
Based on media-related aspects, video transcription typically refers to converting spoken words in a video into text form to add subtitles or captions for that video. The audio transcripts are generated first and then it is used for creating subtitles or captions. You can generate transcript as verbatim or intelligent verbatim as specified. Sometimes, you may be asked for the entire script of the show to accompany your project into distribution at the post production and release stage. In such cases, you may have to transcribe the entire video along with the visuals. Time coded video transcripts are very much important in media industry. You can insert the time stamp at the beginning and end of the shot or to mark each line of dialog as specified.
Podcast Transcription
Podcasts are extremely popular among the website owners. By transcribing podcasts of media programs, you can add more accessibility and search-ability quotient to your website. This will provide you with great opportunity to optimize for most searched keywords and gain higher position in search engine result pages.
Time-synchronized transcripts allow online audiences listen to or watch relevant portions of the audio or video without giving their valuable time for unnecessary details.
Media transcription is a unique form of transcription that requires special skills to capture speechless elements, add time stamps and maintain the highest level of accuracy. It is time-consuming and costly to perform this task in-house. Professional transcription services would prove economical and time saving. Many transcription companies ensure three-level quality control with proofreaders and editors to generate accurate transcripts.
