5 Types of Media Transcription

What is Media Transcription? The process conversion of any digitally recorded media such as Interviews, Videos, Podcasts or Conference calls into text is called media transcription. It is usually a 3 step process which starts with the preparation of a draft transcript. The next step is proofreading for removing grammatical error and improving sentence structure. The last step is preparing the final verbatim transcript. There are 5 types of Media Transcription Services which are most commonly used. These are:
Interview Transcription: It is the process of transcribing digital interviews into text. Interviews itself are of different types. For example, one to one interviews conducted by PHD Doctoral students for completing their thesis project are termed as Dissertation-Thesis interviews. Similarly, other types include research interviews, multi participant interviews and investigative interviews. The main difference lies in the number of speakers and nature of the verbatim transcript that will be produced.

Video Transcription: Is a type of transcription, the spoken speech in video is extracted using transcription software’s. The audio speech is then transcribed into text. It is most popularly used by production houses for subtitling or for producing captions. Other users of VT include news organizations and legal services such as investigative agencies and court reports. Psychiatrists, hypnotherapists and psychologists record the session with patients in video.

Closed Captioning: Caption is that part of the audio which has been transcribed and is made available to the screen viewers at the bottom of display in text version. Captions are of two types – open and closed. In closed captions, the text or subtitles being displayed at the bottom cannot be switched off or disabled. These type captions were popular in earlier days of media when video formats such as VHS, Tape cassettes were commonly use. After the introduction of digital formats such as DVD, CD and Mp3 , the system became flexible and conducive towards developing further feature rich programs. This eventually led to the phasing out of closed captioning and introduction of open captions.

Open Captioning: After the phasing out of Closed captions, open captions are being used. Open captions are subtitles which can be enable or disable from being displayed on screen. The advantage of this system is that not ever user may want to see the text being displayed at the bottom of the screens. So these can be disable easily using options of the TV Remote control. Alternatively, those who wish to see foreign language movies can enable the text scroller. Option captions are also useful in busy and noisy environments such as restaurants, offices and subway tubes.

Podcast Transcription: Audio and video podcasts are a type of digital media and its transcription is slowly gaining popularity amongst website owners. Podcasts transcription is similar to other types of transcription. The only slight difference is the duration which is usually lesser than 10 minutes. Podcasts are a great way of adding resources to a website. Mostly however record and Podcast and never include a verbatim podcast transcript. From SEO’s perspective, transcripts hold significant value when it comes to producing search engine rankings for specific keywords.

List of Common formats of Digital Media: Mp3,Wav,DSS,AVI,FLV , WMA and Garage Band files.