How to export Premiere Pro Transcripts and .SRT to Avid ScriptSync and PhraseFind ?

Report · Feb 23, 2023

Hello,

We are working on a complex feature documentary with many (more than 200) hours of recorded interviews, of which 80% are in English and 20% in other languages (Japanese, French, Italian, German). Adobe Premiere Pro made creating transcriptions and exporting .srt files easy and effortless.

Now, our editor wants to use AVID Media Composer for his part of the work, and we would like to accomodate him because - he is really fast in Avid, it doesn't make any sense to have him learn a new software first and then do the work, and, of course, everyone has the right to his own tools, right?

Similarly to Premiere, Avid offers interesting solutions for documentary films such as ours: ScriptSync and PhraseFind. Using them would allow me (director) and my colleague (writer) to work with out content (the words said by the protagonists) and collaborate with our editor in a much better way.

The problem is: how do we export transcripts and / or subtitles into Avid so that ScriptSync and PhraseFind actually WORK as they are intended to?

Any help and advice on this would be hugely appreciated.

Report · Feb 23, 2023

66 people saw this post already. But there is no answer yet. I know that I am basically asking how to use an Adobe service on a competiting platform… but I think that I made my case and stated the reasons for it. Hopefully, someone will help with this soon. I know about rev.com (they seem to offer transcription and import into AVID) but their offer of 1.50 USD / minute would cost us 18,000 Dollars. Which as an independent and publicly financed documentary we simply don't have. See what I mean?

Report · Feb 23, 2023

To help, we need to know what import format you need - what columns/fields are expected.

Generally, I like the .csv export for max flexibility in reformatting the information.

Stan

Report · Feb 23, 2023

Stan, thanks for getting back to me!

It appears AVID likes plain text files (.txt) with some caveats:

Other encoding: Western (ASCii)
Insert line breaks
Allow character substitution
End lines with CR/LF
Documentation direction: Left-to-right

Thanks!

Report · Feb 23, 2023

The PR transcript export is a text file with CR/LF (if Windows) but timecode is not standard SRT. Does the Captions SRT export import correctly?

What does allow character substitution mean?

Do you have a sample of the Avid file?

Stan

Report · Feb 24, 2023

Yes, the captions srt export correctly.

Character substitution is necessary for languages that have accents (French comes to mind).

No, I don't yet have a sample, I am asking all this before I make a contract with AVID. The free version does not include the ScriptSync option.

Report · Feb 24, 2023

Okay, you're asking three different questions.

1. Scriptsync. You can export Premiere Transcripts as text files. It helps to reformat them with fairly narrow margins in, for example, Word, export from Word as text and then import them as a script into Avid. Your editor (or their assistant) should run the normal scriptsync markup process in Avid so it knows how to find each line.

2. Captions. Export from Premiere as srt. Use a program such as SubtitleEdit to convert to .stl. Import into Avids subcap generator. As long as the starting timecode and framerate of the Premiere and Avid sequences match the subs should be fine. Subs are passive in Avid, so do not expect to use them to manipulate any underlying footage.

(Workflow tip: If you make extensive edits to your project after the initial captioning, it is usually simpler to export a low resolution version of your film, with voices only audio, back into Premiere to re-transcribe.)

3. Phrasefind. Phrasefind is a completely automated process in Avid. As long as it is installed and active (the default) it will index any available footage phonetically and make it searchable.