Transcription for video editors so the paper edit starts before the timeline does.
A video editor can turn a 90-minute interview into searchable, timestamped text in about 3 minutes, because WhipScribe works at roughly 2 minutes per hour of audio. A documentary with 22 hours of interviews uses 1,320 minutes, which fits the $18 pack of 3,000 minutes, and the opening minutes are a free preview.
From the card to the paper edit
Read the whole shoot, highlight the lines that carry the story, then cut.
What an editor's long recordings are
Sit-down documentary interviews that run past an hour, multicam panel shoots, corporate testimonial days, behind-the-scenes audio from a lav or a field recorder. Most of it is speech you need to read rather than scrub. If a camera file is huge, render the audio only from your editing software, or pull the WAV from the separate recorder, and upload that.
How the footage reaches us
The box on this page takes files up to 500 MB; a bigger render continues on upload page, still up to 10 hours or 5 GB per file. Clips already shared from Google Drive or posted to Vimeo or YouTube can be pasted as a link instead of uploaded. Files up to 5 GB start right away, pack or not.
The arithmetic of a project
Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes, and credits never expire.
What comes back for the edit
A brief with the thesis and the strongest takeaways, chapters with timestamps for each topic the subject covered, the names, figures and dates spoken on camera, and the questions the interview answers. Interviewer and subject are named in the summary and key quotes. A chat over the transcript finds the take where someone said a particular phrase.
Why scrubbing loses the day
Logging an interview by ear takes longer than the interview itself.
✗ Logging by ear
You play the clip, pause, type a rough note and a timecode, and repeat for every hour of footage.
- Three hours of logging per hour of footage
- Soundbites remembered as 'somewhere near the end'
- A producer asking for a line nobody wrote down
- Notes that stop when you get tired
- Multicam days that never get logged at all
- Captions typed from scratch after picture lock
✓ The shoot as text
Every hour of speech is readable before you build the first sequence.
- A 90-minute take readable after about 3 minutes
- Timestamps to jump to each soundbite
- Chapters to sketch the story structure
- Names and numbers checked against the brief
- A transcript to share with the producer for selects
- SRT ready for a caption pass on the cut
Sample
A stretch of a long documentary interview.
Illustrative lines written for this page, not from a real shoot. Timestamps count from the start of the uploaded file.
Export
One transcript. Five clean formats.
Every pack exports all five — no format is held back for a higher tier.
Plain text
De-ummed paragraphs. Ready to paste.
SRT captions
Timed to the speech. Every video editor reads this.
WebVTT
HTML5 player + YouTube uploads.
Show notes
Formatted with chapters and pull-quotes.
Machine-readable
Timestamped text for your own tools.
Pricing
Honest pricing, no surprises.
A pack from $4 (300 minutes) opens the full transcript. After that, no subscription and no auto-renew — every tier is a one-time minute pack, and credits never expire. Buy once, use the minutes whenever you need them.
Casual pack
$4/300 min
5 hours of audio — $0.80 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 300 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- AI chat over the whole transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$18/3,000 min
50 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 3,000 minutes of audio
- Summary, chapters and key quotes
- All export formats
- AI chat over the whole transcript
Bulk pack
$32/6,000 min
100 hours of audio — $0.32 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 6,000 minutes of audio
- Summary, chapters and key quotes
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Questions editors ask before uploading footage.
Do the timestamps match my camera timecode?
They count from the first frame of the file you upload, not from the source timecode written by the camera. If your clips carry a timecode that starts at 01:00:00:00 or at the time of day, add that offset when you move a soundbite into the timeline. This is the one thing to check before you trust a paper edit.
Should I upload the video or just the audio?
For transcription only the speech matters, so an audio render is usually the better choice: a 2-hour WAV at 48 kHz is about 1.4 GB, while an AAC or MP3 render of the same take is a little over 100 MB. Full-resolution camera files can grow large quickly; up to 5 GB they upload as they are.
What does a whole documentary cost?
The opening minutes are a free preview. Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes. Credits never expire, so leftovers carry into the next project.
Can I bring captions back into my editor?
Every transcript exports as SRT and VTT, which most editing applications can import as a caption or subtitle track; the exact menu differs by application and version. Expect to adjust line breaks and timing after picture lock, since the cut will move things.
What about music, B-roll sound and crowd noise?
Music, effects and ambience are not transcribed; the speech is. A loud score under dialogue can make words harder to catch, so the clean dialogue track or the recorder's file usually gives a better result than the final mix.
Who can see the footage?
Footage is transcribed on our own servers and is never used to train a model. You can delete the file and the transcript from your Library when the project wraps.
Related
More for editors and producers
Upload the longest interview. Start the paper edit a few minutes from now.
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