The transcription service Simon Says is now offering a tool called Assemble, which is designed to make the rough cut of interview-heavy films as easy as text editing. Instead of viewing the material in the old-fashioned way, it is transcribed when imported into Assemble, whereupon the original sound clips are available in text form. Here, relevant sentences can now be searched for, marked and arranged in a new "document" by copy and paste. This can be read or displayed as a video preview.
Once the content arrangement is complete, it can be exported at the push of a button and forwarded to a video editing program via XML. There you will find the selected text snippets in their original form as video material on a timeline including metadata, correctly with in and out points and in the appropriate order.
This speeds up the work process considerably, but is generally only helpful for certain types of projects, such as TV reports or documentaries. Of course, such a Talking-heads rough cut does not represent a respectable film, which, as is well known, includes much more. As a starting point for further editing, this approach - depending on the working method - can certainly be helpful.
Assembly supports an export to Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro and Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve. The selected text passages can be shared with other team members or customers before the export in order to get comments.
Assemble is part of the Simon Says transcription service, which is available on subscription and per-minute billing.
;)