If you’re a post-production creative, don’t you want to be creative? Anything that expedites that process and minimizes monotonous tasks is a huge win in my book. Below are my 5 favorite new-ish tools and services for optimizing my workflows.
1. Trint — AI Based Transcription.
Trint has been an absolute game changer for my workflow, I literally save days of work on any project with long interviews. I found this on a google search for transcription services and jumped into the free trial. 10 minutes later I had already signed up with a credit card. And no, I’m not being paid for this testimonial.
You upload your video, and in a matter of minutes their service sends you back an interactive transcript. It’s not completely accurate, but with machine learning I’d expect it to improve with time. But what comes next is the really powerful part. The editor (or producer, director, client) can read through the transcript and highlight sections. Wherever you click on the script the video jumps there. As you highlight text it calculates the in point, out point and TRT. At this point you can export and EDL of the highlighted portions, and you have a string-out in Premiere or Avid. I used to spend hours upon hours reviewing interviews to identify the story. Now without even contracting a transcriber or coordinating file transfers I can generate a story edit in minutes.
A few caveats. I’d suggest syncing audio and video first, and generating an H264 file for uploading, and a ProRes master for online editing. Trint doesn’t maintain camera timecode, only file based timestamps so it can be troublesome if you don’t marry audio and video before transcription. They offer a timecode adjustment tool on the platform, but presyncing is a faster solution despite being storage intensive.
Feature request — my hope is that Trint will one day let you copy/paste the text to rearrange it as a radio cut to generate and EDL from.
2. Tentacle Sync — Relatively low cost timecode for all cameras.
Syncing separate source audio and video can be a painstaking and time intensive process. Previously lock boxes have been complex, bulky, unsexy or expensive. Tentacles are smaller than a credit card and provide timecode in the tradition sense (via a 3.5mm mini jack to BNC), or as Audio Timecode (timecode data stored as a screeching sound on an audio channel)
The product comes with it’s own software which I find better than dealing with Plural Eyes. It’s a lot jammed into a product for $500. If you balk at that figure, imagine paying an assistant editor hourly to sync footage manually…
3. Essential Graphics Templates
Essential Graphics are a built-in free feature that quietly slid into Premiere/After Effectsthat allows you to build a template in AE and designate variables (source text, position, color, etc) that you can edit in Premiere with minimal clicks. That’s great, an editor has some control, within confines and even someone with a limited skillset can type to update the graphics. Now say you’re working on a campaign and you have dozens of lower thirds. At the 11th hour your client calls and wants to change the timing of the animation, and color of the text. Uh-oh.
If you built your After Effects project wisely, it lives as a series of precomps that you could update with pickwhipping and expression then re-render… Maybe these are dynamically linked and populate inside Premiere as well so they’ll auto update. A minor annoyance. But imagine, the project was built hastily, and each animation is standalone. Well updating each manually is a mundane and repetitive task. So next time you pledge to build one essential graphics template once, and then any revisions there populate across all instances inside premiere. Even in multiple projects. 🤯
4. Adobe Media Encoder Presets, Groups and slates
In continuing to promote the free efficiency features built in to Adobe’s suite let’s talk about getting the most out of Media Encoder. Beyond the basics, it’s useful to standardize delivery with presets. This could vary significantly based on your needs, but below is a common stack of deliverables I’ll need.
A high resolution master, a downconvert to HD, a file that I can later reedit without the music for promotional purposes, and a variety exports optimized for different social platforms.
Say you complete your ‘amazingvideo.mov’. It’s UHD 3840x2160p but you need a variety of deliverables. You could export them one by one checking specs, and waiting for exports OR you can define common export settings internally at your organization and make presets for each. Then you group them together and drag them once into your Media Encoder queue generating a unique output file for each.
A sample export stack might look like this.
- amazingvideo.mov — Master. UHD ProRes 422, Stereo audio.
- amazingvideo-splits.mov — Features split track audio to edit channels individually later. Useful in producing sizzle reels and repackaging cutdowns. UHD ProRes 422, 8 channels of audio.
- amazingvideo-downconvert. 1080p stereo version.
- amazingvideo.mp4 — Smaller file to send for approval, upload to Facebook or store on your phone.
- amazingvdieo-vertical.mp4 — A setting that defines the ratio as 9:16 instead of 16:9 optmized for mobile services (Instagram/Snapchat)
5. Export to Dropbox (or your preferred cloud service)
And finally, don’t feel tied to your computer while it exports. Unless the deadline is critical (and an exporting error would negatively impact you), set it up to export to a cloud synced folder (or utilize the publish settings). That way you can go enjoy your life outside of the edit bay.
