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Charlie 27
Participant
May 2, 2024
Answered

Adobe Premiere transcription accuracy & syntax

  • May 2, 2024
  • 13 replies
  • 2740 views

Adobe Premiere transcription problems/improvement suggestion: 

(This following is all on good quality dialogue using good mics, clear British accents, no background noise, etc).

 

1. Biggest problem that takes a lot of time to correct - punctuation is poor, it often puts a full-stop in unnatural places (that should be a comma, for a sub-clause in a sentence), but then it does not capitalise the first word in the following sentence (whether correctly or incorrectly a new sentence). 

This seems a simple coding fix..? If This Then That. Then I wouldn’t need to go in and correct as often.

Many times in spoken language, a comma, or a new sentence doesn't matter so much for understanding the dialogue. but a full stop then no capitalisation breaks the flow and often creates ambiguity in meaning. sometimes requiring a second read of a sentence. 

(See what I did there).
Also, my clients often want grammatically correct captions/transcriptions! So I gotta change it… Sometimes captions are just an aid to the audio, but some people rely entirely on the captions/transcript.

 

2. The editing transcription process is a little cumbersome - you need to double click on a word in a paragraph to make that whole paragraph editable (if you’re in a hurry and miss, instead double-clicking on a space, it doesn’t open), then press escape to save the change and go out so you can continue to Play and review. It’s just more clicks and time. I’m not sure the exact solution (or am I missing a function?), but something to work on for future versions.  

 

3.  I have language set to British English but it still uses American spelling in many words, eg “z” instead of “s”. Need more options in Preferences.

 

4. Then there is general mis-hearing/mistaking words, understandable this will happen at times, but it is less accurate than the best AI out there, hoping Adobe’s transcription will improve! Or integrate OpenAI’s Whisper? I’d love the option of using remote/cloud large model for better accuracy. (I am separately looking into using Whisper then importing .srt, but there are pros/cons to that). 

I quite understand technical language may not be recognised and accept correcting that (eg I film/edit/caption a lot of medical conferences/interviews).

 

I tested the transcription with a friend's much newer PC, compared to my 10-year old iMac - no improvement in accuracy on the above problems. Speed isn’t the issue in this case - even my old iMac creates the transcriptions perfectly fast enough - accuracy is the important issue for me. 

Other than this, editing from transcriptions is a great help in Premiere (searching phrases/words, jumping to places in the video etc), just need the accuracy to improve! 

Correct answer Stan Jones

A user reported this without reference to a version. I checked 24.5.0, and it is fixed there. That's probably the first Release version for the fix.

 

Stan

 

13 replies

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 6, 2024

> I just found the Spell Check Language also in the Transcript panel after your comment (was English Carribbean (?)), but presumably this is for after a transcript is created..? I will experiment. 

 

Right, after. And the spell check is, I think, using the OS system particulars.

 

Kerstin and Alexander are actually quality engineers (I think), and have done a great job getting focused attention on bugs and issues.

 

Stan

 

Charlie 27
Participant
May 6, 2024

Ah thanks v much Stan. 

 

Yes, I don't recall punctuation being this bad, had been many months since I had a project needing this much transcription. 

Yes, importing corrected transcripts would be great! Or import transcripts made using other software, that Adobe then matches to the audio, then one can still use the edit-from-transcripts, create captions, etc. 

 

I have had English (UK) set in Preferences > Transcription > Language. 

I just found the Spell Check Language also in the Transcript panel after your comment (was English Carribbean (?)), but presumably this is for after a transcript is created..? I will experiment.  

 

Enter/Esc for correcting transcripts - thank you! That is much faster, I can stop and edit as I play/proofread through. I should have dug into tutorials more...

 

I had done a cursory search for these issues in this forum, didn't see that post you linked to. 

 

Thanks for flagging to mods! 

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 6, 2024

> (See what I did there).

lol.

 

Upvoted. My general reaction to accuracy issues is a) to encourage continuing improvement and b) to create something new or to enhance the "import corrected transcript" to 1) support import of existing, correct transcripts and 2) make the external editing and reimport of transcripts better.

 

See my comments on an earlier report about accuracy:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-bugs/captions-need-more-corrections-than-in-past-versions-random-punctuation-capital-letters-skipping/idc-p/13741748#M7132

 

I'll emphasize my observation that language packs are complex and are updated.

 

1.

I did a quick test creating a transcript from the same clip in 24.3, 23.6.5, and 23.6.4, and did a couple of compares using Notepad++. There are a variety of differences between each version/transcription; some are improvements, others not.

 

Specifically, I looked for your observation that some full-stops are followed by a lower case letter. I see that in 24.3, but none of those occurences were present in 23 or 22. I think this is a bug.

@Kerstin Ebert @Alexander_DVA 

 

2.

There were many changes to keyboard shortcuts with text-based editing. Many of them were functions related to selecting text for setting in/out points, not editing text. But now, when the focus is on the text panel, you can enter edit mode by pressing the Enter key. Whether that is better than double-clicking the mouse may be a personal preference. I like it because I am going to be using the keyboard to edit the text, and the Esc key to exit and save the edit (or Shft+Esc to exit Edit mode without saving).

 

3.

The spelling preference in the text panel is set to British? Or just the transcription language? In any event, I'm assuming you are talking about the transcription language, and the result of the transcription. And that is just incorrect.

 

Stan