Adobe Premiere transcription accuracy & syntax

[Charlie R-T]

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! 

[Stan Jones]

> (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-version...

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-riss 

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

[Charlie R-T]

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]

> 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

[Kerstin Ebert]

Hi @Charlie R-T,

thank you for your detailed feedback, we appreciate the input!

I checked the issues on my end and I also noticed that randomly some words following a full stop are not upper case. It doesn't happen all the time – but it happens, so it's a bug and I logged it. I'll keep you posted once I have an update on this!

Thanks,

Kerstin

[Charlie R-T]

Thanks Kerstin! 

I just did another transcript last night that I haven't proofread yet. Still lots of full-stop then lower-case start to next sentence. This one was on a pretty fast PC, vs my old Mac on the previous videos/transcripts. Maaaybe slightly fewer mistakes but still 30-50% looks wrong skimming through. Not sure if spec of computer makes a difference, doesn't seem to. (Latest version of Premiere on both systems).

Thanks for looking into it!

[Rachilli]

I agree about #1 and #4. On your 2nd point about double-clicking to edit text: At the top of the text panel there is a pencil icon for "edit active text". While it's 1. not intuative, and 2. not quick, it is arguably one less click.

My suggestion for Adobe is to allow "edit active text" to be assigned to a keyboard shortcut. That way there is no moving your mouse to click a button, just a simple key-bind that speeds up that process.  

[Kerstin Ebert]

Hello @Charlie R-T ,

I'm happy to share that the bug where some words at the start of a sentence are not upper case is fixed in in the latest Beta, 24.6.0x8. Please try it out and let me know if it works!

Best,

Kerstin

[Stan Jones]

I can confirm that all full stops were followed by upper case in my sample in Beta 24.6.0.8. I checked 24.4.1, and, as expected, there are errors.

Stan

[Charlie R-T]

Awesome! I haven't had a chance to test yet but I see @Stan Jones did, thank you so much for fixing the bug! 

[Charlie R-T]

...aaand finally got round to testing, well, using on a real project. Just transcribed an hour of (health industry) conference/seminar presentation by many different people (with a mic so good sound quality). I've not proofread it yet, but skimming through the transcription I can see full-stops are followed by capitalised words, plus anecdotally it looks like it recognises the messy sub-sub-clauses vs where a sentence/idea really does end, that people speak in when unscripted off-the-cuff. So this will make my proofreading much quicker and easier - thank you! 

[Blue-Marble]

@Stan Jones Is there a list of shortcuts for text-based editing? The enter key is nice to know, but what about selecting without the mouse?

[Kerstin Ebert]

Hi @Blue-Marble

here you'll find a list of keyboard shortcuts for Text-based Editing: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/text-based-editing-faq.html -> under the section "What keyboardshort cuts are supported".

Hope that helps!

Best,

Kerstin

[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