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Unfortunately, that's the one thing I don't like about Daily Transcripts. In my career I've shifted away from general and business transcription simply because the time it takes to do a video shoot with two people versus a business lunch with eight people recorded on a shitbox Radio Shack memo taker in a busy restaurant is substantial, and their "hard audio" rate doesn't sufficiently take that into account. Once you've gotten some experience and multiple clients, you can do what I do; I turn down any file which involves an unmoderated discussion involving more than three speakers, especially verbatim, especially if it's audio only, unless they're willing to pay by the page. Per minute rates never seem to adequately account for the complexity involved, whereas a per-page rate is a lot more fair (and what the rest of my clients use most of the time). Unfortunately, until you get enough experience and clients to be picky, you're going to have to take the occasional crappy tape along with the rest. Generally, there are enough video shoots to even things out, but if you get a run of really bad work you can always mention it to them and see if they can help you out. Most of the time, the standard is 15 minutes of tape in an hour of work. Starting out, that's probably what you'll do on good audio, with bad audio taking more depending on the quality. You will speed up, though, and you'll get access to better jobs as you get more experience. As-broadcast work can be much, much faster once you get the hang of it, and pay rates tend to start in the $30-45 range for a 22-30 minute episode. Even there, however, your mileage may vary; a dialogue list-style ABS for NBC/Universal is a hell of a lot quicker to put together than a script-style ABS for HBO, and technical transcripts and shot-list ABS can be a freaking nightmare -- but worth it if the pay rate is commensurate and the show is well put together. (I just did a technical transcript for Inside the Actor's Studio and I want to buy that director a beer. If Spock directed a show, it would be Inside the Actor's Studio. Beautiful coverage.)
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Apr 5, 2012 00:15
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Zapf Dingbat posted:Wow, that's kind of a relief. I was really bummed out by that job yesterday. What's crazy about the rates are that they're not the worst I've seen. There are companies out there that pay 40 cents per minute for conference calls. I just don't see why anyone would go that low... Selling quilts on Etsy ought to be more productive than that. Yeah, until you get the hang of technical transcripts, that's probably your best bet. I've got the additional issue of transcribing into Inqscribe, which exports in plain text, which means for the multi-column format I have to type a tab-delimited transcript, import that into Excel to get the cells set up, then paste the result into the Word template for final formatting. Between that and the arcane shorthand I use to note shots during the transcription process (so I don't have to go back through a second time), my raw technical transcripts look like bloody Sanskrit.  Did you at least get a script or closed-captioning file? I hate doing as-broadcasts without those. I love HBO because they usually provide the script, and you can see the differences in the final episode. Like with Game of Thrones, most of it's almost verbatim, just recut into a different order, while a show like Eastbound and Down is borderline improv. Danny McBride in particular tends to run pretty far afield from what's down on the page.
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Apr 5, 2012 15:24
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Zapf Dingbat posted:Nope, I didn't get any sort of text or script. Just a sample of a previous episode. Was it the format with three columns, no lines around the individual cells? If so, there's something royally hosed up about that template. I've actually told them to leave me out of any work in that style, just because I can't figure out how to get it to format properly outside of copying and pasting directly into each individual cell (which would take hours). Normally I just paste into the template, adjust font and size, and maybe tweak text alignment within the cells, but I spent hours trying to get that to work and it just wasn't happening.
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Apr 7, 2012 09:10
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Actually, that's a professional shoot; the audio quality is more due to the fact that it's a RealMedia file and heavily compressed. They do it for a reason, though; only someone who's never transcribed would consider that file all that bad. I could tell you horror stories. Radio Shack microcassette recorders plunked down in the middle of a 14-person table at Spago during lunch. Clients trying to save money by cranking the sensitivity down so far on their voice-activated recorder it only picks up the middle syllable of words. It gets so much worse than that file. Pray you never have to spend much time doing academic or business transcription. Luckily, however, media work is usually much, much better. If you can get through the Daily Transcription test, that's probably the worst file you'll see for some time. They dropped RealMedia a long time ago, and encode everything in Quicktime now; the files are a dream compared to that sample. (The format on the document file may be a casualty of changing standards; in any case, if you just paste into the file provided you should be fine. They're not going to ding you over margin confusion, they want to see you can follow rules like the spacing/time coding format/et cetera.)
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Apr 18, 2012 04:19
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Zapf Dingbat posted:Okay, I've got a technical problem this time. I have a Quicktime audio file that has a drop-frame timecode embedded in the file. My transcription software (Express Scribe) doesn't seem to be able to display this embedded TC, and I can't control quicktime player with a foot pedal. kazmeyer, do I just need to suck it up and buy another piece of software? Or is there a workaround? Does Express Scribe allow you to offset timecodes? What you might be able to do is start the TCs at whatever the first time code is and go from there. I use InqScribe, and one of the main reasons I switched was it seemed to handle time codes much better than ES for me. I think they have a free trial, you might try downloading that to see if it works better for you.
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Apr 19, 2012 19:32
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Holy loving God. I'm always interested in hearing about new gigs, and a friend of mine is applying to do SpeechInk transcription through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. She asked me for advice about the instructions, and sent me the guidelines. They want <sp></sp> around every speaker name, <st></st> around any onscreen text, <p></p> around every entry, and time codes every five seconds (even in the middle of a sentence.) I think if a client asked me to transcribe like that I would actually hit them. kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 19, 2012 |
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Apr 19, 2012 23:16
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AuntBuck posted:You can change the start time with Express Scribe, just right click on your file in the Express Scribe window and click on Dictation Information. Enter the start time in the time offset box, but watch your time codes. If they stop tape or skip ahead five minutes you're going to have to change the time offset again. In my experience, the clients that use burned-in time codes usually don't dick around with cuts -- at least I've never seen a burned-in TC file where the time code jumped around. (I have seen just about every other goddamn stupid thing a client can do with a time code, though, including periodically pausing it during the interview to indicate "off camera" time and then forgetting to turn the loving thing back on. "Hey, all these time codes are the same." "Yes, that three pages of conversation all took place in the same second. Apparently your sound guy is Doctor Who.") Also: You might want to look into audio/video conversion software. Jodix makes a bunch of purpose-built converters, or there's always something like Handbrake. DT has this unbelievably irritating habit of sending me 500+meg Quicktime files that can be a bear to work with, and crunching them down to smaller mp4s can make a world of difference in the headache department. If one file format isn't playing right, conversion might fix the problem. kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Apr 19, 2012 |
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Apr 19, 2012 23:32
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For me, Inqscribe was the way and the light, man. The only major issues are a) it's not free and b) it works best with Quicktime-based files, so you'll want to get something like Handbrake or Jodix Free Ipod Video Converter to turn .mpgs, .avis and .wmvs into .mp4s for best results. Also, instead of transcribing directly into the Word document, you'll be transcribing into essentially a plain-text file which you'll then copy and paste into the document, so occasionally you'll have to do a bit of format cleanup on the back end (and those three-column technical as-broadcasts will become virtually impossible). But for their standard format, it works really well.
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Apr 20, 2012 14:15
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For a pedal, most transcriptionists tend to go with the Infinity IN-USB-2. At $55, it's a pretty reasonable value. I've got an older IN-USB-1 myself, and it's been rock solid since I got started in the business. As for headphones, audio quality and closed-ear cans are key. Lots of bass can be a problem -- usually when audio is lovely, it's lovely because there's too much bass -- but you might be able to adjust for that with an equalizer. Sound isolation is the biggest thing, though, if they'll cut out some of the ambient noise that's about 80% of what you're looking for. Right now I'm using a set of Sony MDR-XD200s (after my beloved set of Plantronics cans failed on me); they have a switch on each earpiece to go from "music" to "movie" mode (plays with the bass levels) and they've been passable.
kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Apr 24, 2012 |
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Apr 24, 2012 03:44
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Spartan421 posted:I'm gonna try to apply to Daily Transcription. Wow, that first file they make you do on the application page is a nightmare. Plus it would be nice if there were more example templates to verify your work on. I've transcribed about five minutes of audio in the last two hours but I'm slowly picking up speed. If I get hired I will definitely invest in a pedal. The pedal will make an enormous difference in how fast you are. Here is a decent deal on the industry-standard pedal (plus some earbuds you probably won't use for transcription and a USB hub).
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May 7, 2012 18:53
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Don't thank me yet; I'm sure you'll be cursing my name when you're hip deep in some five-person focus group with crap audio where at least three of the people are ESL.
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May 12, 2012 20:39
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Not really, no. You get what you pay for when it comes to content mill work.
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May 13, 2012 06:42
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Armitage posted:I think at this point you're gonna find 99 scams for every 1 honest to goodness job posting on Craigslist. If you're looking for general unskilled, sure. There's plenty of legit work on Craigslist if you have a specific skillset, though, and it's where I've gotten all my current transcription gigs. But yeah, you're going to be in trouble if you can't recognize an advance-fee scam right out of the gate like that.
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May 17, 2012 21:25
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Transcription is all about experience. As you do more of it, you'll naturally get faster, which will help your per-hour rate. But the most important thing is experience in media transcription. There are a ton of outfits that don't hire transcribers without experience, and their pay scales tend to start at $1/minute. Even at DT there are jobs they only give to experienced transcribers. If you get a rep for being reliable and turning things around quick, you'll get access to rush work there, which usually pays in the $1.25-$1.50/min range. The key, though, is getting into as-broadcast work. As-broadcast jobs involve finished episodes of TV shows, so the editing has taken care of most of the noise, and the pay rate can be phenomenal. Typical pay rates start at $30 per half-hour episode (an episode being anywhere from 22 to 30 minutes depending on the source) and go up from there. Technical transcripts, which involve timecoding and shot details, increase that by at least 25% and usually much more. ABS and technical work is where the real money is, but they don't offer those jobs to transcribers without experience because the level of detail/accuracy is so much greater. If you ever get offered an ABS job to try out, give yourself plenty of time to do it, double-check everything, and do the best job you possibly can. Lots of people bungle those, so if you can demonstrate the ability to do them right they'll keep handing them to you. So yeah, unfortunately, it's going to take some time slaving away at the lower-paying gigs before you'll get into the good stuff. But it's worth it.
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Jun 9, 2012 22:13
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I feel you -- when I first started out, I was an Open Office devotee, but those little tiny formatting differences drove me batshit until I went out and bought Office 2007. You can always ask your transcription clients for a sample/template/whatever, and plugging your text into that makes things much easier. I can't remember the last time I set a document up by hand, honestly. I just did an ABS for Aaron Sorkin's new HBO show The Newsroom, and I set it up by pasting the text into an old Game of Thrones script I'd already set up with the right styles. (One of the many reasons I've stuck with DT so long, other than them just generally being a good outfit, is the fact they work with Food Network and HBO.) But yeah, hang in there and you'll get off the bottom rung. When I think about the jobs I was taking in 2008/2009, I just shudder. Business transcription gigs with 10+ speakers, completely shitbox audio equipment, taped in a noisy restaurant, "can you differentiate between speakers even though there's no video and half the speakers sound like Charlie Brown's teacher?" Nowadays I won't even look at that kind of crap anymore.
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Jun 9, 2012 23:33
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By revoicing, I assume you mean running the audio through your headphones, speaking into your mic, and letting Dragon take it down? I don't see why that wouldn't work, because a fair amount of what you'd be dealing with is single-speaker audio. You'd have to figure out some cues for stuff like timecoding, [LAUGH], [CLEARS THROAT] etc, but it's definitely doable. (I've considered setting that up myself, but I never get around to it because I haven't used Dragon in a long time and I remember it being kind of a pain to train. Have to look into it again.) I also occasionally get people who ask if they could just feed the audio into Dragon and let it do the work for them. The results are always hilarious. poo poo audio is poo poo audio, and most of the houses understand that. They expect you to give it the old college try, but if it's just not doable, it's not doable. I had one the other day that was literally someone holding up a microphone to the speaker of a tape recorder and pushing "play" on a 10-year-old cassette of an interview; I think I averaged one [INAUDIBLE] tag every two or three sentences. I just pointed out how terrible the source was, and they said they and the client were both aware, and thanks for trying. Generally speaking, when you download an assignment, before you confirm you should at least skim it and see if there's issues with the audio. If you don't think you can do it, let them know ASAP and they'll bounce it to someone else; they might have bat ears or a mixing board and can get something out of it, or they'll bounce it a few more times until it comes back and they tell the client to stop trying to record interviews in a wind tunnel with Charlie Brown's teacher.
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Jun 13, 2012 01:09
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So has anyone gotten an update/gotten paid by Monarchy yet?
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Jun 16, 2012 04:28
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[00:02:30] KAZMEYER: Well, uh, I guess you'd say the... [COUGHS] the format for ums, uhs, and other things sort of, well, um, sort of looks like this. [LAUGHS] Every company does it differently so I recommend that you pay close attention to their [orientation?] materials to make sure you get everything [INAUDIBLE]. (Keeping up with the different styles is the most infuriating part of the gig, since to do this full time you pretty much have to have multiple clients. I can't count the number of times when I've had to go back and change an [INAUDIBLE] to (unintelligible) or [LAUGH] in the middle of a sentence to (Laughs) on its own line.) kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Jun 25, 2012 |
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Jun 25, 2012 02:33
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Deacon of Delicious posted:Kazmeyer, you mention needing multiple clients to do transcription full time. Was it difficult for you to get to that point? I know Daily Transcript mentions on their site that it is possible to make $400-$600 a week if you do enough work, but is that overly optimistic? $400-$600 would be pushing it; if you got a bunch of rush work you might be able to do it, else you'd be pulling more than 40 hours at their usual rate. They don't always have enough work to provide everybody that much. Also, trying to make a full-time paycheck from one client is pretty much the single stupidest thing you can possibly do as a freelancer, because you have absolutely nothing in the way of job security and if they close up shop or just hit a drought, you're hosed. If you're good at what you do, you can often land on your feet -- freelancers live and die by the quality of their work, something that's kind of refreshing when you first come from the overly-politic hellscape of incompetence that is the business world. If you're talented, you'll find work, but it's always best to have a backup or three. My philosophy is to have way more clients than I need. Right now, I've got three active transcription clients, another that's going through a drought, another I can pull work from if I ever feel like it, search engine work, and a very intermittent writing gig. If everyone's flush with work, I get to prioritize the high-paying jobs, so that if one client has a nice easy as-broadcast I can tell the other I'll take a pass on their multi-speaker .70/min audio file. I've also got a couple other opportunities I'm toying with picking up, and I check Craigslist for transcriptionist wanted postings every few days. It can be difficult trying to freelance full-time at first, but once you get some serious experience under your belt it gets a lot easier. My latest gig nearly hired me just based on my resume alone, but when I took the time to Google the company mentioned in their test file to get the correct spelling of the name (research will save your soul, kids) they basically said "gently caress the rest of the testing" and put me to work immediately. And TIC -- my week last week at DT was pretty light. I think I turned down one file at one point, but even considering that I made about half what I did the week previous. It comes and goes. DT has been crazy busy compared to some of my other clients; I literally haven't had a job from one of them in three weeks. kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Jun 25, 2012 |
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Jun 25, 2012 04:18
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Yeah, the beginning of summer usually is real hit and miss, as is December. The good thing about multiple clients is that you stand a good chance that one of them isn't dead during the slow season, and you can make up the difference. Of my four primary clients, one's absolutely dead, one's running at less than half usual capacity, and the other two are bursting at the seams. I think my record week at DT was probably right around $400, but I had a lot of as-broadcast stuff that week which definitely skews high. At their normal rate, and assuming you hit the average of 15 minutes of tape per hour -- and it's rare you'll meet that average if you're taking every bit of work you can get, because if you're asking for that much work you're going to end up with some godawful business tapes -- you'd be pulling 38 hours to make $400. So yeah, it's technically possible to pull down $4-600 a week from DT, I just wouldn't expect that to start.
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Jun 25, 2012 06:37
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Yeah, bilingual transcription is huge right now. I actually took two or three years of Spanish in high school and remember a fair amount of it, so I'm considering grabbing Rosetta Stone to brush up and then taking a few courses for fluency. I see multilingual translation jobs every day; most are Spanish, but Hmong and Pashto are also pretty in-demand. (But, as I've said, learning Pashto means you're going to end up working for the government, so transcription will be the least of your worries.)
kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jun 25, 2012 |
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Jun 25, 2012 23:06
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Honestly, it's been so long since I used Express Scribe (about three days at the beginning of my transcription career) I can't really give you any specifics. I picked up Inqscribe early on and adore the program; outside of a few minor issues I've never had a problem with it. But I can offer some advice that might help. There are a couple of different styles of pre-timecoded file you're going to run into. Some of them have an actual timecode track burned into the file, and if you have a program (like Inqscribe) that can read that track, you're awesome. Your timecodes will automatically sync with the on-screen number. Generally speaking, this type of file is either Quicktime or WAV, and they make your job much, much easier. Unfortunately, other types of files simply have an on-screen timecode with no burned track, and you've got to handle the offset yourself. This can get tricky, however, because, for instance, Inqscribe's built-in player can handle many different file speeds. I think the default is 30fps, but a lot of stuff is shot in 29.97 fps or 29.97 fps with drop-frame. If you don't have your player speed set to the video speed, then by the end of a 30 minute file, you're going to drift a few seconds on the time code. You'll literally start out at, say, TC+01:01:30 and by the end of the tape you'll be at TC+01:01:34. Then you also have cuts and editing to think about. When they have to do non-interview stuff for a while, they'll shut off the camera, and when they come back up the TC will have jumped a bit. You have to make adjustments for those yourself, and you pray that the sound guy isn't a complete shithead who cuts the recording every minute and a half (like I've seen happen). So what I would recommend is to try out Inqscribe. You'll need to pick up Handbrake, or Jodix Ipod Video converter, because Inqscribe likes Quicktime files more than anything else, and converting your video will save you enormous amounts of grief. Once I have a file in .mp4 format, I load it into Inqscribe at 29.97 fps, and let it play for a few seconds before dropping a timecode. I figure out the offset at that point, and then I scroll two-thirds of the way through the file and check the offset there. If it matches up, I know I have the right file speed; otherwise I try another fps setting and check it again. Worst case scenario, you get a file with a non-standard speed or a lot of cuts. When that happens, you just have to pay attention to your timecodes as you go through, and making notes where you need to change your offsets. (Inqscribe will let you highlight a block of timecodes and offset only those instead of changing them throughout the entire transcript, so you can deal with multiple cuts in the same file.)
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Jun 26, 2012 06:29
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Monarchy's currently reading the forums and posted today, so hopefully we'll get an answer. EDIT:...and he logged off. Welp. kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Jun 29, 2012 |
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Jun 29, 2012 01:12
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RabbitMage posted:I understand stuff happens, absolutely, so I was glad to hear from him when he said he'd be paying out on the 27th at the absolute latest-that was his everything-goes-wrong-worst-case-scenario date. But it's not the 27th anymore. That, and the fact that he hasn't commented about it (but did log in to post in the PPACA thread) leads me to believe that we probably got screwed. Hope nobody took him up on that "take on some more work before the 27th" offer.
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Jun 29, 2012 02:15
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I went ahead and sent in a report, just to spur things along. Zeta Taskforce is handling it, so feel free to PM with details of your communications and what's owed. Hopefully this will get things moving in the right direction.
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Jun 29, 2012 05:19
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Scamming and getting over your head in a legitimate enterprise and deciding to cut and run really aren't all that different from the worker's perspective; either way we don't get paid for our work. To make it clear, I didn't report Monarchy with the intent of getting him banned for scamming. If he makes good, all's good; he's actually not the flakiest client I've ever had. And I believe this is a legitimate clusterfuck on his end, but you have to understand how "everyone's getting paid tomorrow"/<crickets> looks. I just wanted there to be some kind of official pressure towards actually resolving this other than a bunch of emails and PMs that were largely going unanswered. (Incidentally, my very first transcription client -- the one who still owes me upwards of $1500 -- paid me north of five grand before unexplained payment issues started cropping up. She's the reason I advise people not to work without W-9s and contracts, and she's the reason I was waiting for the first batch of work to pay out before I took a second one.) (Related note: If you ever see an ad for Winged Words Transcription or Linda Britt wanting to hire transcribers, run the gently caress away.)
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Jun 29, 2012 20:31
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Generally speaking, DT doesn't like a lot of slang (or at least they didn't when I first started) for readability reasons, so I've gotten into the habit of "going to" in place of "gonna", "want to" in place of "wanna", etc. I'll occasionally drop an "'em" if the speaker drops the "th", but I generally don't drop trailing g's or anything like that. I don't correct grammar, though, so if someone says "we said we was going to the store" I record it as they speak it. Honestly, I think you're probably fine either way; if they don't like something you're doing, they'll tell you to knock it off. (And of course this is something every single outfit does differently, so if you pick up work from another client be prepared to learn their rules as well. Focus Forward, for instance, doesn't like "okay" unless it's the direct answer to a question, I've got a client that wants me to differentiate between "gonna" and "going to", etc.)
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Jul 1, 2012 23:33
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DT can be pretty busy sometimes, and we're heading into the holiday, so it might be a few days. You've made it over the hump, hopefully they'll get back to you early in the week and get you going. And yeah, I don't know why everyone pushes ES. (Well, outside of it being free, I guess.) I can't stand using anything but InqScribe, to the point where if there's a format I can't do because I use InqScribe -- like DT's three-column technical scripts, they're a royal clusterfuck with IS -- I just tell them not to send me those jobs. Worst one I had was when a client wanted me to use this proprietary software of theirs that required in-out timestamps on every line of dialogue and you couldn't use a pedal with it. I told them I'd be happy to transcribe in that format providing they were paying $10 per minute of tape. We found a way around it.
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Jul 2, 2012 02:51
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RabbitMage posted:Of course the issue with this is that most of the stuff I've written is pretty specific to what Monarchy wanted. I'm not sure how to market five articles on coffee makers to the general public, after all. So the odds that I'm going to get a roughly equal amount of money from this after trying to alter/cobble together what I can is pretty low. Yeah, I agreed with Zeta that "giving the articles back" wasn't really a solution to the problem. I managed to track down one of the forums where they were selling their websites, and basically a lot of people started complaining about work not getting done around the end of May. From about the 31st, all of their official representatives seem to have vanished, and there are still people trying to get refunds -- and they're out (at least) $297 a pop. pastorrich: What kind of CS work is it? Like level 1 tech support kind of stuff where you're reading from a script? I've always been kind of curious about that stuff, but my transcription and writing gigs have kept me generally just busy enough not to bother looking into it any further.
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Jul 2, 2012 23:49
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Tesla Insanely Coil posted:Being able to type fast isn't too important. Having the ability to listen and type is much more useful. Things like dialogue, typing in lots of things like time codes, and bad quality audio will slow you down. I've heard that a good speed is averaging 15 minutes of tape per hour. I wasn't really doing that at first but now that I've been doing it for a month I can see definite improvement. Well, typing speed helps, because the faster you type the easier a time you have keeping up with a speaker. But I honestly don't know my WPM, and as you say, the tape quality/number of speakers/etc. factors in a lot more to your transcription speed. 15min/hr is a good average, and it's what most places expect and price around (those that pay by the hour), but I've had tapes so lovely I was getting about 5 minutes per hour and I've had some that were so good I was able to do them almost in real-time. And yeah, research can be a pain, but you'll get better at it. I'm lucky because I'm a sponge for useless information, so when someone spouts off a technical term or medical condition there's a chance I've heard it before, and I'm really good at parsing terms that I'm unfamiliar with. If it's really slowing you down, just use the [PH] or [?] tag or whatever the client wants for when you have to sound something out and just move on; they love it when you get stuff right, but if it's killing your time don't worry about it. And yeah, you definitely want media experience, and you want a rep for being able to turn around work fast. Get both of those, and you'll get rush and as-broadcast work, which is where the real money is. The usual transcription grunt-work will pay the bills, but a single special assignment can make a huge difference to your weekly take-home. I did two episodes of The Newsroom for DT this past weekend -- as-broadcast scripts -- that by themselves were double what I made all last week from them.
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Jul 6, 2012 17:23
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You'll get the hang of verbatim. As a matter of fact, it'll become so second nature that the few clients who ask you for non-verbatim (usually called light edit, means leave out ums, uhs, stutters, and false starts) will drive you absolutely bugshit.
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Jul 6, 2012 21:05
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For transcription, you definitely need decent headphones. A $20-30 pair of Sonys will work just fine (like the ones I'm using right now) but the key is closed cans, you need the ones that completely cover your ears to cut out ambient noise. This will make an enormous difference in how well you can understand audio. And yeah, Daily Transcription is worth it. Most of their tape isn't nearly as bad as that sample, they pay slightly more per minute, they have rush and specialty work available that pays a good bit more, and it's media transcription, which is your gateway to the really lucrative jobs. Focus Forward isn't awful, but I'd definitely try to get in the door with DT if at all possible.
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Jul 12, 2012 04:27
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lancelott posted:Is it a bad idea to try to transcribe on DT or FF with $5 earbud headphones? That's the only pair I currently own. The sound quality is OK, not great, and I have a good quality dedicated sound card. I'm using Sony MDRs (not exactly sure of the model) that were about $20 on Amazon and they work just fine. The key is closed cans. You want them to cover your ear entirely to block out the ambient noise. It makes a world of difference in being able to understand people. If you hunt, you should be able to find something in the $15-30 range that'll suit. (My very first pair were Plantronics I picked up from Office Depot for a song, and they lasted me like four years before I had to replace them, still bummed about that.) And yeah, DT loves large numbers on the schedule sheet. Lots of their stuff is in the 45-60 minute range, so if you only put yourself down for 30 you'll miss out on quite a bit. It's kind of annoying for people like me who juggle a lot of clients -- 30 mins per client per day is the perfect number for me. Just don't go nuts and ask for more work than you can handle, and remember, 120 minutes of production-quality interviews is one almighty gently caress of a lot different than 120 minutes of business transcription.
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Jul 13, 2012 01:04
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Spartan421 posted:I just rejected some work from Daily Transcription because apparently I need to open these QuickTime files as .bwf files in order to view the timecode in order to transcribe properly. Anyone know how to do that? I spent like 20 minutes looking for converters and messing around in QuickTime and Inqscribe to no avail. Ah, jeez, those are those weird wave format files -- did you try just opening them in InqScribe and selecting "use media time code"? I know I got assigned a job with those a while back, but I can't remember if they worked in InqScribe or if I had to kick them back out.
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Jul 15, 2012 19:37
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"Hey kazmeyer, I've got a project coming up that you might be interested in. All I am allowed to tell you is that the NDA is frankly terrifying." "...I'm in." (Do your time in the salt mines, junior transcribers, and you get to have some real fun.)
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Jul 19, 2012 03:41
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I seem to remember there was some way to get Express Scribe to drop timecodes -- or maybe that was a third-party program, back when I first started transcribing. Honestly, that's one of the reasons I switched to InqScribe; it handles timecodes much better. (In InqScribe, you hit a single key to drop a timecode into your document at the current time, and you can set them to begin at a certain TC or you can go back and adjust them at the end of the job all at once.) And I had a feeling that dialogue list job was going to be a nightmare; I passed on picking one up. That's my one big complaint about DT -- the rates they offer aren't always commensurate to the amount of work you have to put into their jobs. I always check files over very carefully and read the client requirements before I confirm anything, and if it looks like it's going to be a death march I turn it down. And they still get me; I had one a while back that looked innocuous except for the client's "everything either person says, even if it's just mmm-hmm or uh-huh" requirement. Turns out the interviewer said "mmm-hmm" and "uh-huh" every 1.5 seconds while the other person was speaking, and the 30 minute tape had nearly 600 separate lines of dialogue. That's why I love per-page or per-hour gigs. They're kind of rare, because it's a pricing structure that makes it difficult to estimate job costs to the end client, but it's the only way to really make sure you're paid adequately for the amount of work you put in. And no, the super secret job isn't government work -- that's what you get if you respond to those ads looking for Pashto or Farsi transcription -- but I can say that having found out the client, yes, if I revealed details, they'd put my career up against a wall and shoot it.
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Jul 19, 2012 18:23
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Zapf Dingbat posted:What's a good per-page rate? I just got a client that pays per page. It depends on their actual page format. Some places offer a per-page rate, but they want tiny margins and spacing and it ends up screwing you over in the end. I've only got one client doing per-page at the moment, and it's $1.50 per page, but with the double spacing and everything else in the format it usually works out to about $1.50-$2 per minute for standard stuff, more if there's multiple speakers. As for turning down work, it's hard to say. Decline too much and you will make yourself kind of a nuisance to them, just because it affects their scheduling. I'm kind of a diva when it comes to DT work and they know that, they just don't offer me certain types of jobs because they know I'll balk -- but I make up for it by trying to knock the stuff I do complete out of the park. And worst case scenario, if DT ever did get fed up with me, I've got a lot of other irons in the fire. If DT is your only (or biggest) client at the moment, I'd be as careful as possible when it comes to kicking stuff back, and make sure you do it early on and not just on a whim. I really do think they'll have to up the rate on these dialogue lists; I can't see a lot of transcribers relishing that amount of work for that small a bump in the rate.
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Jul 19, 2012 19:13
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Spartan421 posted:Cool, I bookmarked your link in case I need it for later, thanks. I just accepted a rush job with some hosed up formatting. Different colors for timecodes and spoken text and centered speaker names. Don't people realize this is a giant pain in the rear end Try setting up individual styles for the various elements. I do a lot of script-style as-broadcasts, and have separate styles for character names, dialogue, action, scene, TCs, etc. It's still a pain in the nuts, but it makes it a little more tolerable.
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Jul 22, 2012 03:30
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I'm not exactly a Word genius so tons of copy/pasting for me.
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Spartan421 posted:Haha, I heard ExpressScribe was free but never could figure out how to get it to work after the trial was over so I switched to InqScribe which is better imo. Yeah, I literally used Express Scribe for one tape at the very beginning of my career and went "gently caress this" and found InqScribe.
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Jul 22, 2012 22:27
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PoorUser posted:I just received an email about being a Title Duplicate Checker for Demand Studios. Anyone know anything about this job? I know that DS has been pretty bad lately so I'm not going to bother if this is going to be the kind of thing where I get one task an hour. Or is this kind of work more steady than the writing side? DS has actually been picking back up, but in niche areas. The days of logging in and seeing hundreds of thousands of titles (and up to 50 writable ones) are long gone, but I've managed to snag a few $25 articles a week this summer. Their editing cadre has been way pared down though, and it takes forever to get approvals, but more titles are entering the system this month and they've been advertising for new writers. As for this position, I have honestly no idea what kind of workload you'd be looking at. In any case, it's not a bad idea to land the permissions just in case; having access to more gigs is always better than less.
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Jul 25, 2012 07:02
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