Best Video Logging Software: Save Time with Transcripts
January 2022
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7 min read
Video logging is typically tedious and cumbersome, even with professional tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro. If your film project has a high shooting ratio it will create many hours of raw footage, which you then trawl through with timecode software to find exact in- and out-points for each clip you want to log. Meticulously you mark the video timelines at relevant sections with careful notes and tags (metadata), doing all this work in advance to help categorize footage for editors to find later.
Because it's a time-consuming task, traditional video logging slows down the whole video editing workflow — it can take weeks to complete these notes for big film projects! This wasted time is an expense. If video logging can be done well faster, it will help editors and producers work more efficiently through the whole project.
We've created Reduct to simplify this process. Reduct is a video logging software solution for dialogue-based video projects such as interviews, testimonial videos, and documentaries. The entire video logging and video editing process is powered by transcripts: you can review and log footage with an interactive transcript, then use that transcript to edit it and create highlight reels. It's as easy as working in a text document, so it lets you move much faster than other professional video software.
In Reduct, the video logging process works like this:
- Upload all your raw footage into the Reduct platform
- Generate a transcript of your footage
- Review footage and highlight relevant clips
- Tag footage to make it easy to find and work with
- Collaborate with teammates to split the job of video logging
- Edit a first cut of your film project
Below, we'll talk about how to use Reduct.Video for video logging and collaborating with other team members. At the end we'll explain how to use your video's transcript to distill your footage down to a rough cut, and integrate Reduct with other video editors for more advanced touch-ups.
Want to see how much faster video logging can be when you use transcripts to do the job? Get a free trial to start using Reduct.Video, with all the tools you need to log and edit all your footage in a fraction of the time.
How Video Logging Works In Reduct
Everything in Reduct is powered by a transcript – as soon as you upload footage, we start transcribing. So let's cover uploading/importing.
Upload Your Footage Into Reduct
Reduct gives you a handful of options to upload video: You can upload files from your computer, push files from another cloud storage tool, or import files from your Zoom account. We accept all video formats and codecs so you don't have to use another conversion tool prior to upload.
Once your video is in Reduct, our online video editor stores your footage in the cloud so it can be easily referenced later on or shared with others. You don"t have to upload or download multiple versions of your video files, and you can split up video logging with other people to work on projects in real-time.
Read More: Best Cloud Storage for Video Editing Solution
Reduct also prompts you to organize your videos into Project-Based Folders when you upload; this keeps your video library well-organized and uncluttered, and it makes it easier for everyone on your team to find and work on the files they have been assigned.
Generate an Interactive Transcript
Then, as soon as your footage is uploaded into Reduct, our platform takes care of generating an automatic transcript for you. Our computer transcripts are generated by AI software, and they're on par with other video transcription software in terms of accuracy (~85%). However, we make it easy to edit our transcripts in case you spot any errors. These transcripts are also ready in a few minutes, so you can get to working on your video project right away.
You can also opt to use Reduct's human transcription service if you want a highly accurate (99%) transcript you can trust. Human transcription is useful when your audio files contain unclear dialogue, several speakers or speakers with heavily-accented English, or background noise. We promise a 24-hour turnaround time no matter the length of your video (we split your files among as many transcriptionists as it takes to do the job), and we offer the most inexpensive professional transcription service available ($1 per minute of audio). Plus, we still offer computer transcripts when you opt for this service, so you can review your computer transcript while we work on transcribing your footage.
Learn more about computer vs. human transcription and how to choose between the two in our other guide: Fastest & Most Accurate Video to Text Transcription Services
Reduct's transcripts are stitched with video footage, powered by our technology. So, you can click anywhere in the transcript and Reduct will instantly take you to that moment in the video. Unlike video footage uploaded into professional video editing software, a video with an interactive transcript is also quickly searchable, which further speeds up video logging — more on this in the below.
Review, Highlight, and Tag All Your Footage
Once you have your transcript, you can start the video logging process. As you review your transcript, you can reference the accompanying video and change playback speeds, and log the most important moments in your footage by highlighting the relevant text — you no longer need to search for timestamps or find the exact in-and out-points for each clip.
As you make highlights, our platform automatically pulls those sections of footage and stores them as video clips (a.k.a. Highlights). Highlights can then be exported and shared or dropped together to create a longer video.
You can also add tags and notes — also known as metadata — to each highlight to categorize clips and identify related content. This makes it easier to find these clips later on in the editing process, and allows you to identify patterns or themes between your video recordings.
It's important to remember: you should work with a consistent tagging system that uses a common language and shared terms during video logging. This is especially important if more than one team member is logging the footage. Video editors will find it easier to identify the footage they need to use if it is grouped consistently.
Reduct makes this possible with tags, and the powerful tag management features available in the platform. Set a common language for logging, and our platform helps teams to use tags they set up previously. It'll even auto-suggest tags for users based on the highlighted transcript text, so users can add metadata to clips much quicker.
After an initial review of all the raw footage, and at any stage of the video editing process, you can use Reduct's advanced search functionality to scan through the transcript for related content. The fuzzy search function lets you search by topic and identifies related parts of your footage. You can then use the search results to make any additional highlights to add to your project.
Once you've made all of the highlights, you can view your library of video clips in the Highlights tab of the left sidebar. Then you can select the clips you want, and drag and drop them into a highlight reel. You can arrange and rearrange as you go, and pull clips from different recordings into one video project, but we'll talk more about video editing in Reduct below.
Collaborate on Video Projects with Teammates
If you want to collaborate with other editors on video logging, you can add team members to your video projects in Reduct, and work together in real time.
There are four different user roles in Reduct, they are:
| Role | Access | Create project | Upload recording | Tag, Edit and Share video | Highlight and Comment |
| Editor | All projects | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Guest Editor | Specific projects by invitation only | X | √ | √ | √ |
| Commenter | All projects | X | X | X | √ |
| Guest Commenter | Specific projects by invitation only | X | X | X | √ |
Note: Video loggers need to be assigned the role of Editor or Guest Editor to highlight and tag video files.
You can also learn more about shopping for collaborative video editors in our other guide.
Bonus: Use Reduct to Edit A First Cut
Reduct also makes video editing faster and more accessible by letting you edit your footage by editing your video transcript.
After highlighting and tagging is completed, you can gather clips together and put them in order to create a longer video story (a.k.a. Reduct Reel). These highlight reels can be tweaked and shared directly from our platform, or serve as a rough cut and be pushed to another edit for more sophisticated fine-tuning.
Reduct Reels are super simple to make: Drag and drop video clips from your recordings into a longer video story, and automatically insert captions or text slides. Reduct creates smooth transitions between all of your clips and slides, so you don't have to worry about clunky video or audio.
To clean up your highlight reels and remove unwanted sections or blurbs from your videos, you can strike through the corresponding transcript text and Reduct will edit those moments out. But don't worry, Reduct never fully deletes footage, so you can always undo strikethroughs at any time.
Pro Tip: Before exporting your Reduct Reel to a more advanced video editing system, we suggest using our text slide feature to add placeholders for additional edits. You can write notes on text slides with suggestions about specific footage to include, music, or visual effects.
Finally, you can export Reduct files to AdobePremiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) to add B-roll, multi-cam footage, animations, and other advanced film editing processes and effects. Rather than by XML, Reduct's integration with Adobe Premiere Pro is done using an extension, making it easy to move between Reduct (a non-linear editor, or NLE) and Adobe Premiere (a linear editor) without the challenge of wrestling with XML imports.
Read our in-depth article for more specific information about video text editing using Reduct.
Reduct Simplifies the Video Logging Process To Help You Work More Efficiently
Whether you're a beginner video editor or an experienced pro, if you are working with word-based footage, Reduct"s text video editing system can streamline the video logging process by allowing you to edit a transcript to edit the video footage itself. And by saving time on video logging, you make the whole post-production process much more efficient.
You can also use all the time, money, and energy you've saved to work on the creative advanced video editing that follows in the final cut.
