Recommendations for Transcribing Documentary Interviews

Many thanks to all the filmmakers who emailed me about their experience with transcription services. Back in the day, transcribing documentary interviews was slow, tedious, and costly. Not so now! Please see their recommendations below.

But first, congratulations to director Pamela Tom! She came to me last year for story consulting on Finding Home: A Foster Youth Story. The film won the Los Angeles Emmy in the Crime/Social Issues Category. She and her core team even got bring home statues!

For transcribing services, Pam and many others like Temi. At .10 cents per minute, it features the ability to watch a thumb nail video as you scrub through the transcript. Amazing!

Filmmaker Joann Self Selvide and her team love Rev for its back-end functions. “You can highlight sections to share notes back and forth,” she says. “Then you can export the highlighted only sections to share with editors/writers.” Rev will translate at $1/minute.

Then there’s Trint, which got recommended by too many filmmakers to credit here but I appreciate all who wrote in.

At $15 per hour, this UK based services provides time-coded transcripts that can discern different speakers. They claim 96% accuracy, but one filmmaker says it’s more like 85% when one accounts for dialects, accents, etc. Trint has a plug-in for Adobe Premiere that lets you create a closed-caption file for post deliverables.

Finally, there’s Digital Anarchy’s Transcriptive plugin for Adobe Premiere.  At roughly .06 cents per minute, it can translate most major world languages.

As with many of these transcription services, you can test first with a free trial. Good luck, and thanks again to fellow filmmakers for their advice!