How To Transcribe Audio Or Video Recordings Into Text

Working on thesis, assignments and dissertation is not that easy. I had to transcribe a number of video interviews into text during my Research Classes. This turned out to be much more of a labor intensive project than I thought, and it quickly dawned on me that the process can be vastly improved via a few technological tweaks. This posting aims to present a step by step tutorial on how to do this most effectively. Special thanks to freewaregenius.com

What you will need:

A text editor : Use MS Word or any other editor you feel easy to use

PotPlayer: You can download potplayer from here

Instructions:

Step 1:

• The First step is to Install Pot Player on your Pc you can grab it from here.
• Run potplayer and press F5,now navigate to General and click on ‘Shortcuts’. The screen should look like the screenshot below. Next click the “add” button to add a shortcut.
  
• Now  do three things (1) check “Focus of any window (global) may control”, (2) click into the focus “Shortcuts” field then press (Ctrl+Down), and (3) scroll down to “Playback” and highlight “Play/pause”. Then click “OK”.
  
• Next create another shortcut, similar to the one above, but use “Ctrl+Left” for your shortcut and scroll down to “Jump (to)” then “5 Sec Backward”. Then click “OK” see screenshot below.
  
• Your newly created shortcuts should look like the screenshot below.
  

Step 2:

• This step only applies if you you are also transcribing the timestamp location of the text as you type, in which case you would want to always have the timestamp be visible on screen.
• Start playing your audio or video file; you can simply drag and drop the file onto the PotPlayer interface to do so.
• Press “CTRL+T” to toggle “On top/On top while playing/Never on top”, as per your preference .
• Press “Scroll Lock” to toggle displaying time information more prominently on top of the display (which can be a huge help). If you cannot easily find “scroll lock” on the keyboard  you can toggle this setting by right clicking the interface, then “Options”, then checking the “OSD: Show Time” entry.

Step 3:

• Launch your word processor, text editor, or whatever you will use to type
• Press “Ctrl+down” to start and stop the media file playback at any time
• Start transcribing
• Press “Ctrl+left” to back up 5 seconds
• Press “Ctrl+right” to go ahead 5 seconds

Special thanks to freewaregenius.com for bringing up this awesome tutorial.