The Wish: A Two Window Viewer the Subtitled Video Alongside a Navigable Transcript Window with Embedded Highlights and Tags
We were faced with a common enough problem: how to convert some long sessions of building our website and web apps into short selections of the best material?
What we wanted was a way that the viewer could watch the video and get the assistance of not only having subtitles but also having a searchable transcript directly alongside. By clicking on a word in the transcript, the video viewer would jump to that corresponding location in the video.
The term for this capability is "Interactive Transcript".
In addition, it would be nice for the videos to have Tags and Embedded Highlighting, further aiding navigation and search.
All of this is helpful because when it comes to informationally dense learning, it is very easy for the viewer to zone out. By reinforcing the video content with multiple transcription expressions, it is that much easier for the viewer to cycle their attention accordingly, helping them to follow along.
The winning formula:
- Record video in Zoom, and save the file to Dropbox
- Using Spoke.app, highlight the video sections that we want to save, then download that video using the download option of highlights only.
- To be very smart about it, since slicing and dicing videos is cumbersome with most video editors, use Spoke.app to segment the original video into the clipped sections of 1 to 5 minutes that we want to use for separate segments in Descript / Teachable.
- Import these Spoke downloads into Descript, get a human transcript rather than the machine transcript, and then use Descript to remove filler words (like umm, uh, like, etc).
- Share the Descript final edits, which are in the form of viewer plus interactive transcript. (Still hoping that Descript comes back with an option to have our comments included and viewable but have new viewer comments disabled.)
- Use Teachable as the hosting area for these Descript videos, via the learn.alwaysinvert.com subdomain.