The Hack to Working Smarter in Media & Entertainment

Webinar Transcription

Austin Canary
We're going to be talking about how to work smarter in media and entertainment. I'm very excited to talk about different workflows using speech to tech services. We have a very special guest today. His name is Jacob, but before we hop into that, let's do a little bit of housekeeping. So, today, all of the attendees are in view-only mode. So, don't worry. You won't be seen or heard during the event. Live captions are available. You can see the screenshot on the right of the screen. There should be a closed captions button. Just click on that and scroll up to show subtitle, and click on that and you'll be seeing our Rev live captions live for this webinar. So, be sure and take advantage of that if you need it.

We'll also be sending out the recording with the captions and slides within the next two days but be sure to post your questions in the Q&A section. We will be having a Q&A section at the very end, so if you have any questions throughout the presentation, we will answer them at the very end, but feel free to go ahead and leave them as you think of them.

So, we're really excited to present with you today. Just to give you a brief introduction, my name is
Austin Canary. I'm the video and content marketing manager here at Rev. Very excited to be with you guys. Even more excited to have Jacob Reed on, who is a distinguished writer, director, producer. If you want to say hi, Jacob, go ahead and hop in.

Jacob Reed
Hello, everybody.

Austin Canary
So, we're really excited to have you on, man. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Jacob Reed
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk to everybody.

Austin Canary
Yeah, we're really excited to have Jacob on because he has put Rev into practice of everything that we dream of on our end on how to use Rev and the media production field, so super excited to have you on. We'll have you pop back in here in a second. So, thanks again, man.

So, let's go over really quickly what we're going to cover today. So, first off, we're going to talk about what is Rev and what do we do? Second thing is we're going to talk about how to streamline production using speech to text services. Finally, Jacob will talk through how he used transcripts with all of his award-winning video content and some really cool things that he has going on and things that he's using Rev with. Like I said, at the end, we'll have a Q&A, so feel free to leave your questions in the Q&A section. All right, so let's get started.

So, if you don't know what Rev is, we are a speech to text service that utilizes AI and human workers. So, we have an AI that does a really powerful job. It's actually what's powering the live captions that you see today on the webinar, but we also have human transcriptionists who do an excellent job that make our accuracy the best in the industry. Let's go over some of the services that we offer. We offer transcripts, captions, and foreign subtitles. To give you an idea of how these apply to the media and entertainment industry is, with transcripts, you can do faster editing and you can collaborate with people, even in a remote environment. We offer the ability to access your transcripts from anywhere and make your orders from anywhere. The best thing about having transcripts of your footage, especially if you're working with non-narrative or unscripted content, is the fact that you can look through your transcripts of your footage and look for key moments, golden moments, in your footage, so that you know what to use to tell your story better.

Secondly, we have captioning. So, if you need closed captions for your distribution process, Rev is there to help you. We also have that with our human side, so humans are captioning your content super accurate, 99% accuracy. It's really great to make sure that you have the best captions for your content before you push it to places like YouTube, Vimeo, or even things like Netflix or film festivals. So, it's a really great service to have for distribution. On top of that, we have foreign subtitles. So, like closed captioning, they are converting what is being said in your content to text on screen, but it's going to be converting it into foreign languages. The great thing about that is that if you're distributing your film or you're posting your film online on YouTube, Vimeo, or even Facebook, you'll be able to reach an extended audience. So, if you only have English captions, you're limited to only people who can speak English, but to other places in the world where English is not the native language, it's great to have all of those languages available so people can enjoy your content from all across the globe.

So, that summarizes the three main pillars of services that Rev offers. With that in mind, let's talk about how to use these services to streamline the production with these speech to text services. So, before we get started, let's talk about some of the current challenges that the media and entertainment industry is facing. Normally, the media and entertainment industry always has these different hurdles, especially when it comes to meeting deadlines and getting your content produced on time, meeting the distributors' timelines so that they can get it out to your audiences fast and effectively. We're always talking about having captions ready at the get-go when you hand your content to distributors or put them on distribution channels. So, that's always been important in the media and entertainment industry, but now during this coronavirus pandemic, most productions are remote when it comes to editing. Even onsite productions where we're having to wear masks, it's hard to communicate, we have limited crews, there's so many challenges right now that you guys might be facing, but when it comes to post-production, it might be even harder because now we can't have a whole team of folks crowd in an editing room and help splice together the story that you're trying to tell. So, almost everybody right now in the post-production side of things is working remotely. They're communicating with directors and producers. They're sending rough drafts and they're sending these rough cuts of the story they're trying to put together and trying to communicate via these remote communication tools to convey what needs to be done and how to polish things up. So, it's not easy, and we know that it's new to all of us. Some people have been doing it for a while, but a lot of us were thrown into this here in 2020. So, it's a hard challenge this year.

On top of that, distribution strategies are shifting where theaters aren't opening globally, or even nationwide here in the U.S. So, distribution of films are being delayed. I know that a movie like Tenet that just came out, that was a really big thing, but it turns out we probably won't see the next big film for at least another month. So, these distribution schedules that were set probably a year or two in advance are now getting delayed. So, we're having to worry about shifting timelines and meeting different deadlines and remarketing things all the time. So, that's a huge blunder right now, and it's something we're all working through.

But on top of that, everyone is trying to work through cloud platforms to make virtual collaboration possible. The problem is, a lot of these virtual interactions are not super efficient, and what we're going to be talking today is how, with a transcription service like Rev, you can make these processes and workflows more efficient in how you collaborate with the footage and with the content that you have at your disposal to best tell your story. So, this timeline shows how transcription might fit into your workflow. So, we've got all the different stages of production and distribution laid out. When it comes to pre-production, transcriptions can help with kickoff calls when you're talking with producers, directors, writers, story editors. If you're recording those conversations to go back and reference, it's best to get those transcribed so that everybody can reference those notes and know exactly what was said, what ideas were conveyed so that you can quickly put together the ideas that were discussed in those meetings.

You can even transcribe discovery calls with talent, and the directors who are assessing the different talent pools, whether it be through Zoom calls or socially distanced interactions, whatever it may be. It might be valuable to have these interactions transcribed so that when a key talent or a crew member is referenced, you can go back and evaluate those transcripts. The best thing about this is that, when you have these transcripts through Rev, you can share them in the cloud with your whole crew or with any of the stakeholders on your project. During production, there's not a whole lot you can do directly with transcription services, but if you're making notes or your director or a crew member is making notes for you throughout production, keeping track of these golden moments that you guys are seeing in front of the camera, you might be making notes that you want to reference back later, which will relate to the transcripts that you'll get for your footage.

That ties into the post-production process, where you want to take all of the footage that you get for your project and get it transcribed. This is especially key if you're working on an unscripted, non-narrative project. So, if you're working on a documentary, if you're working on a Zoom call collaboration, conversation, or an improv session, having a transcript of what people said exactly in your footage so that you can find those time codes and edit faster is super important to be able to edit efficiently these days. What this does is it allows you to collaborate. If you're working for a client or a studio, you can send these transcripts to other stakeholders who can view these transcripts and pick out key moments in these transcripts to help you put together the story. The great thing is that when they're timestamped, it helps the editor, whether it be you or someone on your team, put together a paper edit.

So, when you have transcripts of your footage, you can highlight sections that are important that you want to include in your project, and then you can export them and put them into a doc where you can reference them later, have the time codes, and be able to go find that footage to quickly make an edit with your paper cut. The great thing is that with your paper edits, you can actually get approval for a quick outline or a quick rough cut of your project with a director, producer, or any stakeholder, get their ideas on all the clips that you've selected and put in order to try and best convey the story. The really great thing is whether you're doing it online, or if you're typing it out, or writing it down, you can move things around and you can collaborate with whoever you're working on.

If you do it digitally through Rev through the cloud, you can do it in the transcript. You can highlight different moments and write comments and notes on things that you think are really important to tell your story. When it comes to the distribution process, you can make adjustments in the captions editor once you've captioned your content. So, you want to be able to caption your final project before you put it out to places like YouTube or other online distribution channels. You can also use transcription for discovery calls when you're wanting to make key decisions. Then, finally, whenever you have your content published, you can reference back to your transcripts to pick out snippets or quotes that will best help you distribute and promote your content. Whether it be funny quotes, if you have a short film that's a comedy or something like that, or if you're promoting a web series, you might want to pull out different quotes and use those either in your editing process or use them on social media, whatever it may be.

Just to give a brief list of the benefits of transcription during post-production is that you can record discovery calls and client feedback. You can find those golden moments across hours and hours of footage with simple tools that help you find keywords, key phrases. You can do command F and find exactly what you're looking for in those transcripts. Finding these moments fast in a word document helps you build a paper edit so that you can share with clients for approval before you ever have to hop into an editing room.

This accelerates the editing process because it has these time-stamped transcripts so that, once you have an approved paper edit, you're good to hop into your video editor. You'll use these time codes to find that footage as fast as you can, throw it into an assembly sequence, and now you suddenly have a rough cut of what originally was just on paper. Makes the process so much faster. On top of that, it allows you to collaborate with these teams and your clients with our interactive editor, and it just makes conveying ideas and finding these golden moments so much easier for you and your team. Overall, because you're doing this script-based editing, it reduces the overall production costs because it optimizes your workflows using transcripts, and it reduces the amount of editing hours of going back and forth between you and your director, editor, whatever role you may be playing in your project because script-based editing allows you to basically edit it upfront, find the gold moments that you want, and not have to scrub through hours and hours of footage and create rough cuts of clips that may not even make the cut by the end of the day.

So, here at Rev, we just want to encourage you to make it easier on yourself, especially during this time where everyone is trying to remote edit and remote collaborate with their teams. Using transcription and captioning services helps you save time because it helps you dig through the material much faster. Searching through text in a document where you can control F and find a specific word or where you can Control+F and find a specific word or a name, or a number or date. Whatever it may be, you can find it so much faster than if you're scrubbing through hours and hours of footage on your project timeline. It's a no-brainer. On top of that, you can collaborate effectively, you can share these transcripts, you can make highlights with your team members on moments that you think are the golden moments that you want to use to best tell your story.

And finally, it drives creativity, because not everyone gets to be a part of the editing process anymore. We used to be able to have a crowd of people behind us working over our shoulders saying, "Oh, that clip looks great!" or, "Oh, that sound bite's really awesome!" We don't have that luxury right now, and it makes it super hard to be creative when you're all alone, and you're trying to do Zoom calls in between edits, but having interactive transcripts allows others to be in that creative process, and to help push you to use the best moments to best tell your story. And I think with all this in mind, it's going to be really exciting to hear how Jacob has put this into practice and used transcripts as part of his recent project. So Jacob, we'd love to hear what you've been up to. Oh, you're muted.

Jacob Reed
I'm on mute. Okay, cool. Hey everybody. Yeah. So I am mostly going to talk about two specific projects that I used Rev and transcripts on. One is a documentary, and one is a improvised comedy. But first, I'll quickly go over my background, which is always fun to do for everyone. So my background is both on the filmmaking side and also on the comedy side, I am a improviser, and have spent about a decade performing and teaching at the Upright Citizens Brigade, which is a improv theater here in Los Angeles. I've directed for Jimmy Kimmel Live, Buzzfeed, Funny Or Die, Nickelodeon, bunch of fun places.

And I've also done a lot of commercial work, and I would say about maybe a third to half of my commercial work has been unscripted, kind of docu or reality style shoots with real people either talking about their experience or talking about something else, and for a lot of those projects, I didn't know about Rev, but if I did, I would've loved to have it in my workflow, because just the experience of searching and searching through for these golden moments, or once you have an idea and connecting something, is really time-consuming, and it's something... I never think that transcriptions or AI or anything like that is going to replace the editing process, but it's a tool that makes it so much faster.

So that's a little bit of my background as far as what I've done, but I also, I don't know what the backgrounds of everyone watching this are, but I also just want to mention I have worked in post on a lot of other projects and on my own projects throughout my career. And so, I am also approaching this process not only as a director, but also as someone with an editing background. So anyway, that's how I kind of came to Rev. And so, as far as discovering Rev specifically, coming from improv, I have always wanted to do a short that was fully improvised. So a lot of the time, especially with comedy, there will be room to play around with dialogue, or if you have a good relationship with the actors and everyone feels comfortable, to re-improvise sections of a script to have the most organic performances and reactions, and see if there's something fresh, or unique, or interesting you can bring to it even after the script has been honed. But I had always wanted to do a fully improvised short, just around a premise.

So, two other improvisers and teachers from the Upright Citizens Brigade, Suzi Barrett, and Becky Drysdale had a bit that they had done that I'd seen them do, where Suzi pitches Becky on gum, in a world where chewing gum doesn't exist, and if you start thinking about it, it's really hard to describe what gum is without the example of, we all know what gum is. So we did this short, and we knew how we wanted it to start, but we really wanted to discover all of it as we were shooting. So we had coverage and we had a script supervisor, but we really wanted to improvise a ton of the dialogue and the entire direction of the script.

So all three of us are improvisers, and we would start and just kind of start going in a direction, and not really think about, "Is this going to make it into the final cut?" but just "Is this interesting to explore?" And we'd go down that avenue, and we had a script supervisor, but when it came to editing it, Becky and Suzi are extremely funny and talented, and it was just hours of equally funny material that I was then like, "Oh no, how am I going to make this cohesive?" And so, that's when I started looking for, is there a way to transcribe this? Because I would look through footage and make notes, and then use the script notes, and try to kind of cobble something together. But once I found Rev, what I ended up doing is I made a sequence with my favorite moments, which ended up being about an hour and a half, but this is for just a comedy sketch, so I was looking for maybe like five to 10 minutes maximum. And so, in order to pare it down, I used Rev.

So yeah, we had hours of that, and so what I really wanted to do, is the reason we improvised it, is to both have the performers play at the height of their intelligence, and keep each other on their toes, and challenge each other to have to come up with more and more specific descriptions and explanations. But I also wanted it to feel really organic, to feel like you're actually watching TV, we'll have a conversation, and not that it's totally scripted. And so, that does feel like we just filmed an improv scene, but what we would see in a minute long or two minute long clip, is actually little snippets of different improvisation that happened over the course of hours of exploring different topics, but then we kind of structured it in a way that it seemed like one fluid conversation.

And so, that's where the transcription was really helpful, because especially with comedians and people who are great improvisers, they're going in a bunch of different directions, and so to then take that and streamline it, it really required a transcript to be able to make a paper edit. And we were able to do that not only so much faster, but also when you're reviewing the footage, you can get caught up in a lot of things that you should be looking at on footage, as far as angle, and visual performance and all of that, and using the transcript allowed us to just focus on like, what are the essentials of telling this story? And then from that paper edit, we went back into the editing process.

So that introduced me to Rev, and then more recently, I was working on a project with some friends for this thing called the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge. And so, if you don't know about this, you should check it out, it's really cool. It's a film challenge that happens every year, and so, typically what happens is you're given a genre, and a couple of objects or prompts to incorporate into your short film, and then you make a short film over the period of 48 hours. And so, it might be like it's a horror film, and it has to have a bottle of ketchup and a dog, just so that everyone knows that you didn't plan it ahead of time. And someone, a key member of either the crew, or in front of the camera, the actors, needs to have a disability of some kind. So that the subject matter doesn't have to be about disability, but it's a way to normalize and expose our industry to the, really, large number of people that have different disabilities.

So anyway, this year, because of the pandemic, it was done all remotely, and the challenge was to do a documentary. And so, they gave us five days instead of two days, but we still had to come up with an idea for a documentary, shoot the entire documentary, and then edit it all in five days, all remotely. And so, it was really challenging, and our film ended up being one of the finalists, and is now on its way to some other festivals. But what we found is, we're going to have to collaborate all remotely, and we're going to have to find a story. We thought... This idea came up, my friend [Santina 00:00:24:20], who's the subject of the documentary and who's also one of the producers, uses a wheelchair, and what she was discovering is that throughout quarantine and the pandemic, she was having a lot of Zoom calls where she would meet people for the first time, and they would not necessarily know that she's in a wheelchair, which is something that in her entire life, she had never really experienced because it's something people tend to focus on.

And so, we had this idea, what if we explored that and had her talk to a bunch of strangers, see what they thought, and then let them know that she uses a wheelchair, and see if that changed their perceptions? So to do this, we had to set up a bunch of calls with strangers and film them all, and I think with any documentary, your final story is going to be a little different than what you set out to make, but we really set out to just do this experiment and see what happened, and see how it made us feel and see how it made Santina feel. So we ended up having about, we shot for the first two or three days, and then we had two days to edit what ended up being about 50 hours of footage, which was stupid to think that we were going to do that.

So, because I had used Rev on some of these other projects, I was like, "All right, let's put it all through a transcription, and then we can all have access to these shared documents," so that I ended up being the editor for this, but while I'm editing, the other producers and writers could look through the footage and find different things. And I mentioned before having a script supervisor, which especially when it's a script supervisor on a shoot that I've worked with a lot and I have a good shorthand with, I think their notes end up being really helpful, as far as what I want to use or what I liked, or all of that. But especially with something that's improvised or with a documentary, as your story changes or evolves, your notes, whether it's from a script supervisor or producer, or from yourself, the notes that you take while you're shooting are based on what your idea of the film or the project is at that moment.

Once you get into editing, if you notice something that you didn't notice before, or if something changes in the world, or if your story changes, then you're in a position, which I feel like happens on so many projects, where you go, "Oh, okay, yeah. We could go in that direction. Did anything happen to support that?" And normally, that means going through tons of footage, and with the transcript, what was great is we could just search for keywords that we remembered. Or like at one point, Santina made a joke about like, "Man, this is so heavy. I wish we could just do a thing about how everyone said I had great hair, because I remember a couple of people said that." And so, we would just be like, "Yeah, let's look for hair," and then we got every comment, and we ended up making a joke in the documentary about it.

So yeah, with each person that we had a conversation with, they would talk to Santina for about 20 minutes, and before we even brought them into the Zoom, the four of us producing it would kind of talk about what are our goals for this, maybe Santina would share how she's feeling, and we're recording all of this for the documentary. So after that, we would then talk to them about what are their first impressions of Santina, and that's another 15, 20 minutes, and then sometimes she would come back and then talk to them, and they would kind of learn a little bit more about each other. And so, when all was said and done, I think we did 16 or 17 different conversations with people. We didn't use all of them in the edit, but each of those was about an hour, hour and a half of footage, and so, it ballooned pretty quickly.

So we actually, for the challenge, we did a five minute version that you can find online, and then when that was over, because we only had 48 hours to edit it, we always knew we wanted to go back and then kind of explore some bigger moments. And so, while we did use Rev early on for some quick help, a huge part of our post process was using these transcripts. So when we were working together, our workflow, our screen pretty much every time we would all log onto Zoom together, was a combination of our Zoom chat, me screen sharing my edit in Premiere, and then we had two documents, and I saw someone asked about this in the Q and A too, so we can talk about that probably later.

But what I found really helpful about Rev is that for each video that I uploaded, it has a full transcript with time code with each of the speakers, and you can, when you upload it, you put a little description of each of the speakers. So I had a little trouble, me and Steve and the other producer are both nondescript white guys with glasses and facial hair, so it was like, "The one with the hat," or "The one with the red shirt," and then all of our different people that we interviewed. So you kind of give a little description, and then you get the transcript back pretty quick with each of the speakers outlined.

So you can search in Rev for anything that they say, you can also watch it in real time, and any time you search for something, like on the screen right now, it says, Jacob says, "I did. Now I feel like I'm crazy," and so I start saying that at 01:53:39, but even if there was a longer paragraph of text, you can double-click on whatever actual word or phrase, and the time code will pop up above that. And it is the time code that is in the video uploaded to Rev, but for us, that was big video uploaded to Rev. But for us, that was basically the same as our time code. So if anything, sometimes I had to move backward or forward a couple of frames. But with 50 hours of footage, the main goal was narrowing down to the area. So even if it was within 10 seconds of it, it wasn't a huge deal for us. So we had that. And then, because we had all these different videos, you can see on the left, we had a Google Doc where we had all of the videos we were using for the edit, a link to Vimeo, and then a link to the transcript. So we did it like that before we realized you can actually even play the videos right in the Rev user interface. So if we did this again, we wouldn't actually need the Vimeo links. You can basically just link to all the Rev transcripts. So copy pasting them into this Google Doc is what allowed us to search all of the different conversations in mass.

So instead of having to upload all of our footage in one video, we could just look across all of the different, I think that Google Doc is 400 and something pages. So we could look through all of the different transcripts to find something. And then if you copy paste directly from this Rev interface on the right, it gives you the time code also. So those time code links in our Google Doc would go directly to opening up our Rev interface where that moment happened. So it was a learning curve a little bit because I edit, but the three other people I was producing with don't edit. But for everyone within an hour, they were basically up and running and being able to look for different things. Let's see. Is there anything else I said I would talk about?

Oh yeah. So one thing that I really loved about this is the kind of fun part, and we're in the trenches part of working on a project that I feel like I've really missed almost as much as shooting something in this remote social distancing time is the feeling of it being in the edit bay with your whole team and making these magical discoveries. And so this was about as close as I think we could get to that without being in the same place, because we were all on Zoom, especially when we were doing this 48 hour edit turnaround, we would just live on Zoom with each other and everyone would have the Zoom window open, the Rev window open and just be looking back and forth and helping each other find things. And instead of other editors or directors or producers popping their head in the way they would at a production company or studio or something to see, how's it going? What are you working on? It was just like our roommates and significant others, and a baby running around and popping in.

So it was the same amount of distractions, but it felt like we were all in a room together, which was really cool. Is there anything awesome that we talked about ahead of time that I'm glossing over? I know we're going to do a Q&A too, but let me know if there's anything I'm missing.

Austin Canary
Yeah. No, I think you touched on everything that we talked about planning for this. It's just so amazing to see those cuts that you shared with everyone today. It's amazing to see how you're able to take this amount of footage in such a short amount of time and put it together all with a remote crew, essentially. I'm curious, how would you make a deadline with this without transcripts of your footage to search?

Jacob Reed
It would just take so much. I'm a director that loves the edit process. I particularly love it when I'm not the one who has to do it. If I can just hover over someone and they do it, that's even better. But it's like doing a puzzle, but also looking for a needle in a haystack. And so sometimes you remember something that didn't exist and sometimes you remember something that did exist, but it's a 10 second moment in hours of footage. And so to find that is really hard and I think having a transcript like this that's searchable and it's interactive allowed us to be a lot more creative because we could have ideas, like I mentioned, like the joke about everyone talking about Santina's hair and when we actually put it in the documentary, it's like we put seventies kind of like sultry, almost soft core porny kind of music where she throws her hair back and then everyone's like, she had great hair, wonderful hair, long brown hair.

And we made this really fun little moment out of it. When you're in the edit bay, that's the kind of thing that takes forever to make because you have to find all those pieces. And a lot of the times, you find all those pieces and you search for them for however many hours it takes. You put it all together and it doesn't work, and you look at it and you're like, oh, okay, well, I'm glad we tried that. It doesn't work. Let's not use it. And doing that takes a lot of time. So let us be more creative because we didn't have to go through that really, really long searching process of actually watching in real-time all of the footage to find those moments. I mean, there are great editors out there who have this incredible sixth sense for being able to tell when someone is talking to camera versus rehearsing their lines, or just by at four times speed.

They just watch through and be like, okay, that's something, or that's something, or looking at their wave form. But even the best editors that I've worked with, it's not as fast as just [inaudible] feels like searching your Gmail for, where's that email? It's basically that easy. So yeah, it was really cool to be able to do that on a whim.

Austin Canary
That's awesome. Well, I really appreciate you sharing your story of how this project came together. It's amazing to see our product integrated with a project like this in real-time and in real life, being put to use. So I think today, our key takeaways is that as more and more remote projects become a thing, and especially going forward as things hopefully normalize in the years ahead, the media and entertainment industry is going to continue to face new challenges, but there's going to be new technologies like using transcripts and using interactive online cloud platforms to work with others faster and more efficiently, that are going to enable you to work faster, but also like Jacob is alluding to is that it can allow you to be more creative, to find moments in your footage that you wouldn't normally focus on, but maybe there's a small story to be told that you weren't even paying attention to during production.

Having Rev allows you to convert video footage to texts more easily and edit and find these golden moments so that you're not scrubbing through hours and hours of your project timeline in premiere or final cut. It makes your transcripts searchable, shareable, and having them in basically a Google Drive type environment with Rev allows you to share them very easily with your team. So thank you again, Jacob, for sharing your story. I think it's just amazing to hear it all put to use. The most ridiculous timeline, five days and 50 hours of footage, it's just unreal. I mean, you basically put together a short documentary with a feature length amount of footage, it sounds like. It's incredible.

Jacob Reed
The funniest thing is that we came up with that idea because when we thought of documentaries, we were like, well, we don't want to do something that is going to involve research because research is going to take a bunch of time. So let's just film all this stuff, which is clearly people that have not [inaudible] a documentary before.

Austin Canary
It's brilliant, though. I mean, the fact that you basically took your love for improv and the amazing things that you can pull out of people from that, and you basically put it into documentary form, which I just find that so fascinating. And I was really, really excited to see those clips today. So thank you for sharing those.

Jacob Reed
Cool. Yeah. Thank you.

Austin Canary
Cool. So this wraps up our presentation part, but we are now in a Q&A. I know that we've already had some questions come through, but if you have any questions about what we've talked about today, if you have any specific questions about Rev that you'd like to ask me, or if you have any workflow questions for Jacob or I, please feel free. Drop your question in the Q&A box now and hopefully we'll have time to tackle it before the hour is up. But we'll go ahead and get started with some of the questions that have come during the presentation. All right. So the first question is, the transcripts are timestamped, but is there a way to include time codes because editors need time codes and not timestamps? That's a good question.

Jacob Reed
Yeah. I kind of have that question too. Although I talked a little bit about my workaround, which was just that when I was searching through my footage, I would just grab the Rev time code or whatever time code my producer said, "Oh, I want to look at that clip or let's look at this." And just type it in and then add 00 after it to [inaudible 00:09:40]. And [inaudible] within a second or two of what we were looking for. So it wasn't a huge time suck.

Austin Canary
Yeah. And I think it all depends on sort of your workflow and the amount of footage you're working with, but I'd be happy to follow up with that one so that we can learn more about the person who asked this question, what your workflow looks like, and maybe how we can address that with different time codes instead. The next question, is there a way to search through all of your transcripts for phrases or words? Search through all the transcripts at once? So this was something that you actually brought up, Jacob, and to my knowledge, there's not a way to do it through Rev. I know we definitely have it on our billing blocks where we're thinking about it, especially as we move more and more forward into the team collaboration tools, we know that being able to search multiple transcripts at a time is a need when you have more than one interview.

This project today was a great example of why you want to search multiple transcripts. I know for you, Jacob, and I know for me personally, a workaround that I've used is a lot of times, I end up wanting to collaborate further in Google Docs. So a lot of times, I'll just download the transcripts as a doc file and then you can search through everything within your Google Drive. You can also do the same on your local computer. So I think that's the current workaround. I apologize to my product team, if there is a way to do this and I'm just not currently aware of it, but I know it is something that we're looking at.

Jacob Reed
[inaudible 00:41:23]. I want to say it took maybe like 45 minutes to set it up for us, but again, our amount of footage was massive. So it was a high 400 page count Google Doc. If your footage isn't that much, I bet it would take less time to set up.

Austin Canary
Yeah, that's crazy. Okay. The next question is, does the AI allow for transcriptions in languages other than English? We often record interviews in other languages. That's a great question. Currently, the only foreign language services we offer are subtitles. So essentially, there could be a workaround where you get your footage subtitled in the language that you're looking for, but we currently only offer English transcription services. And those can be done by our AI, but primarily they are done by our human transcriptionists, which are English only at the moment. But like I said, if you have footage that needs to be translated from another language, there is the option of ordering foreign subtitles as well. We had a comment come in from Carolyn that she wanted to see more. So props you, Jacob, for the engaging clips that you provided.

Jacob Reed
I don't know how she found out about it, but I'm 95% sure that that's my mom.

Austin Canary
That would be amazing.

Jacob Reed
[crosstalk 00:42:48], but my mom's name is Carolyn and I feel like she must be trying to be a
supportive mom and being a plant.

Austin Canary
Good mom.

Jacob Reed
It's awesome. Yeah. There's a five minute version of it that is online. It's called, full picture, if you look up Easterseals full picture. The edit is rough because we went from 50 something hours of footage to a five minute cut in 48 hours, but there's a polished edit that's about 10, 11 minutes long that we're all really, really proud of that we are going to be putting online soon.

Austin Canary
That's great. That's awesome. So yeah, keep your eyes open for the new version from Jacob. I'm really excited for that. We had a couple of questions come in that were pretty similar. What is the difference between Rev and Temi? What does Rev offer that Temi doesn't? So kind of a fun fact, hidden secret, we are Temi as well. It's just our initial AI product that we offered for auto transcription services. So if you use auto transcript services through Rev, you're essentially using the same Rev AI engine that powers Temi, and I believe they're priced around the same price point. But the great thing about doing it through Rev is that you're going to have it alongside any human transcript orders that you might process. So I don't think there's anything that Rev does doesn't offer that Temi offers because Temi is essentially an AI only product.

But with Rev, you can order both the auto- draft, which is our AI product, or you can order the polished version, which is the one done by our humans that's 99% accurate. So yeah, there's not a huge difference because we are essentially the same services, but just Rev offers the human side. Jacob, where do we see the final film online that you just showed us? I think you shared that it's coming up. So I don't know if there's anything else.

Jacob Reed
I just texted my mom and she was like, "No, what's a webinar?" So I guess that's not my mom. So thank you to whoever-

Austin Canary

Jacob Reed
So, I guess that's not my mom. So, thank you to whoever is asking about where you can watch it. I also should say that, we are desperately looking for fund, [inaudible] to help finish it. So if anyone watching this, has access to grant money, or as a producer, or wants to learn more about the project standpoint of being a Hollywood gatekeeper... Actually, if anyone's a Hollywood gatekeeper at all, and doesn't think I'm awful, please reach out to me because I would love to keep making stuff and have someone pay for it. But yeah, otherwise it'll be up online at some point, probably on my website once it's online.

Austin Canary
That's great. And, hopefully anybody who's listening today, if they're interested, we will be more than happy to pass on links from Jacob, if you want to learn more about his project; so, we'll be happy to do that. I'm sure it's going to be really great. And, if you can get involved, that's awesome. So, a lot of more questions about where they can find your films. So, that's really cool. You're getting some early publicity, right now. Let's see. Does Rev have a platform that allows you to edit the transcript, or does it need to be downloaded as a word file? It's a great question, CJ. Rev does offer an interactive transcript editor. So, whether you do it by yourself or with a team it's interactive, it's basically like a Google doc where anybody can edit it. If you give them the permissions to do so, you can share it. You can highlight it together. You can make notes together, and you can edit the actual texts in the transcript.

Say, if something is misspelled or a name is misspelled, you can all edit it within there; and that, comes free with any transcription order that you place, whether it be auto or a human, and that will be in the Rev TC Editor. So, when you order a transcript, you have the option to just download it as a word doc, text file, or PDF. But if you click edit, it'll actually take you to the online TC Editor. And, when I say TC, I mean transcript. So, I apologize if I've said that throughout the presentation without giving you guys a heads up.

Let's see, can my Temi transcripts be transferred to Rev, so I can combine AI and human? That's a great question. I don't think that's currently a possibility. But, I know as we push forward with our team tools and file collaboration, I know that's probably something that we'll consider. At the moment, I don't believe that there's a way to transfer it over. But, ideally you just back them up in a Google Drive, and then just start using Rev going forward. We have a question for Jacob. So, how do you plan to use Rev in the future on any upcoming projects?

Jacob Reed
Ooh, yeah. Well first of all, I would love to use Rev on anything that I do, that is not scripted. And I mean, probably on things that are scripted, but just the number of projects I've done in my career, especially unscripted commercials where they're going to end up being, 30 or 60 seconds, and you shoot for a couple hours with a bunch of different people. The amount of how much you're shooting, and how much you're using the edit, it's such a fraction and it would speed up post so much, to be able to use Rev.

And also, be able to have creative conversations, especially when you're talking to brands, where you could support what you want to do creatively, with arguments you can make from footage. That's always really helpful. For myself personally, because of my background with improv, what I would really love to do is... The Gum short, which you can also see the Gum short, if you want to hear eight or nine minutes of people dissecting what gum is, in the funniest way possible, that is online, if you search for... Or, I think it's on a website that's just, what is gum.

So, if you would just ask what is gum, type it in, .com, you can find that. That was a proof of concept for a style of filmmaking, I would love to do, using improvisers that I know and that I work with frequently, to come up with concepts for shorts. And even just over Zoom, especially while we're all in quarantine right now, having a Zoom chat with a bunch of funny improvisers that I know and exploring ideas that way. And then, having a transcript that I can look over. And, especially as some of these people, like Suzie and Becky for example, are both working actors and writers; and, they're really, really busy.

Suzie's on a couple of different shows. Becky's the head writer for The Tonight Show. Like, it's really hard to get their time. And so, what I would love to do is, people at that talent level, just ask them like, "Hey, hop on a Zoom call for like 15, 20 minutes, and let's just improvise and screw around." And then, let me do the work of sifting through all the stuff we talked about, and distilling what are the ideas that would make a really great short or a really great pilot. And then using it, not only as a way to edit existing footage, but to develop material. Again, if there's any Hollywood gatekeepers with money that want to fund that, let me know.

Austin Canary
That's so awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. Another one for Jacob. Do you feel that you missed out on anything creatively having to collaborate with your team remotely?

Jacob Reed
I mean, look like to be real, yeah, it's a weird time, and I would much rather collaborate with every everyone in-person. But, this was like 85 percent accurate to the experience, maybe even 90 percent accurate to the experience of working with people in a room. And in some ways, it was not as good; but in many ways it was better, because the level of accessibility was just so much easier. And there's also, when you're in an edit room, the editors always get the last word no matter what, because they're the ones controlling what footage you're looking at, and that's good, they should, I don't have a problem with that.

But, what's cool about this process is that everyone can be looking at the same time, and it makes the collaboration so much more accessible because it doesn't all have to funnel through an editor. And, it eventually will funnel through an editor, and I believe very strongly that editors have a important creative role in shaping projects. But, it's nice to have everyone be able to have, a super informed conversation about what the creative is, because they have that level of access to all of the material.

Austin Canary
Yeah, I agree. We're even doing some remote collaboration projects here at Rev, where we're doing Zoom calls with Revver's who do the transcription work, and we're doing calls with customers. Basically, just having conversations on, their life and their workflows. And, it's been exciting for me, to not just have to tackle doing these remote editing projects alone. I can send the transcript to another co-worker say, "Hey, can you sift through this and see if there's anything that I'm not seeing that's interesting, or a really cool moment, or something we can dive further into, in the next conversation?" Or, something like that, so.

Jacob Reed
There's something about the way your eyes work too, because even if you're by yourself, and it's not like fighting for control of who's showing what's on the screen. When you're watching footage, you can only see in real-time, what is in front of you. And, one thing that we found happened a couple times with this documentary, is we would be looking for one piece of footage, and the section below it, or above it in the transcript had something interesting in it. And normally, when you're not doing the paper editor, or with the Rev transcription, you would have to watch that or happen to watch it; but when your eye is just looking at a page, you can kind of like absorb more of it at once, almost, if that makes sense. Like, when you're like hopping around in a book or a magazine, or maybe that's just me, because I have a small attention span, but it's like that.

Austin Canary
Yeah, I'm totally with you. Because, our minds can sift through a page of text so much faster than we can watch a one minute video equivalent. So, I think there definitely is some advantages, like you were saying. There's probably that one-on-one, hands-on interaction that you lose, all being in an editing room, people hovering over your shoulder. But same time, there's some big advantages using this technology, especially if you have people on your team who are going through the transcript that are more productive than you; and they're like five minutes ahead in the interview and they're like, "Hey, I've already found these four moments." So, like, "Oh, sweet, I wasn't even there yet."

Jacob Reed
It's great.

Austin Canary
I think the final question is; is there just any advice that you'd leave the audience with today?

Jacob Reed
Yeah. I have like a practical advice and then like deep existential advice. The practical advice is, put transcripts and subtitles on all of your videos, any video you put in the world. Because, first of all, there are people that are hard of hearing that, don't have access to any of what's happening in a video. If they don't have an angle to read lips or if there's not a good transcription in the auto transcriptions, on a lot of places are really... Like on YouTube, for example, not to disparage YouTube, but they're not always accurate. So, taking the time and especially with Rev, it's so cheap that makes your videos accessible to everybody. But also, I was a creative director at BuzzFeed for a little while. And, one of the stats that I remember is, something like 80 or 90 percent of videos on the internet are watched without sound, because people are on the subway, or in the bathroom, or wherever else.

And so, not only to make it accessible to all different types of people, but you'll just get a much higher watch rate. The deep existential advice is, just whatever you want to do, just do it, and stop talking about doing it. And, I wish I would take my own advice, because it's so easy to compare yourself to what everyone else is doing. And, I shoot down all of my ideas, not all, but many before I ever knew them. And, what was really great about this Easterseals challenge, it's Santina and myself and Stephen and Liz, the other two producers, have talked about it so many times.

If we didn't have the deadline and the fire under our butts to have to turn something in, in five days, none of us would have made this documentary. And, it's something that we are so proud of, and that we feel it's a really important story to tell. And, none of us would have told it, if we didn't have that time constraint; so many great ideas, or just never see the light of day, because we give up on ourselves. And, we shouldn't do that, and I should remember this advice myself, because I do it all the time.

Austin Canary
I'm with you, Jacob. I think that's the best piece of advice, you can give people in the creative and media industries right now. Especially with, how heavy everything feels with everything going on; whether it be, the political climate, the coronavirus, or the fact that there's orange skies over California right now. There's so many things that could weigh us down and be an excuse to not be productive, but I love that, that's the advice that we're going to end on, is just do it. As Shia LaBeouf, says it the best, "Just do it."

Well, I just want to thank you so much again, Jacob, for being with us today. I really enjoyed our conversation and getting a little glimpse into how you went about making this amazing project. Super excited for the new edit that's coming out in due time. And, we'll be happy to follow up with everyone that was on this call today, with a link to that. And, anybody who wants to get involved or help Jacob out, please let us know, we'll be happy to forward those emails to him. [crosstalk]

Jacob Reed
Thank you guys for having me.

Austin Canary
Yeah. Thank you.