Transcribe documentary interviews for the paper edit.
You shot hours of sit-down interviews and the edit starts with reading them. Drop each interview below and it comes back as text with timestamps, key quotes and chapters, at about 2 minutes per hour of footage. The first 20 minutes are free, and packs from $6 cover the rest.
Before you open the timeline
Read every interview before you cut a frame.
A paper edit starts with text
Print the transcripts, or open the DOCX files side by side, and mark the bites you want. Each line carries its timestamp, so the selects you highlight on paper can be found in the footage without scrubbing.
Quotes and themes already pulled
Each interview comes back with key quotes, chapters by topic and a brief of what the subject argued. On a shoot with twenty subjects, that is a first pass at the selects before anyone has listened to a full interview.
Timestamps from the file start
The transcript's clock counts from the first frame of the file you send, not from the camera's embedded timecode. If you work in source timecode, add the file's start time in your edit software; for a single long take it is one offset.
Footage, not just audio
Audio is what gets transcribed, so a camera file works as well as a lav recording. Smaller files go through the box here; a long interview shot at high bitrate continues on the upload page, up to 5 GB, or share the file from Google Drive.
The cutting room
Building a story from twenty hours of interviews.
✗ Logging by ear
An assistant listens to every interview and types a rough log. It takes weeks, and the editor still scrubs footage to find the exact words.
- Logs that paraphrase instead of quoting
- Hours lost listening for one remembered line
- A subject's best answer buried in hour two
- Director and editor working from different notes
- Selects that cannot be found again in the footage
- The edit waiting on the logging
✓ Working from transcripts
Every interview is text with timestamps, so story structure is built on paper and found in the footage in seconds.
- Exact words, so bites are chosen as spoken
- A timestamp beside every line
- Key quotes and chapters for a first select pass
- Subjects named in the summary and key quotes
- Search across all interviews for one topic
- DOCX for paper, SRT or VTT for review copies
Sample output
Hour two of a sit-down interview.
Written for this page as an illustration; it is not a real interview. Labels here mark topics, the way chapters do in the returned transcript.
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 $6 (500 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
$6/500 min
8 hours of audio — $0.72 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 500 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$12/2,000 min
33 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 2,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
Bulk pack
$24/5,000 min
83 hours of audio — $0.29 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 5,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Documentary interview transcription, answered.
How long does a two-hour interview take?
About four minutes of processing. Upload time depends on your connection and the file size; a Drive link avoids it.
What do twenty interviews of 90 minutes cost?
That is 1,800 minutes, which fits in the $12 pack (2,000 minutes) with a little to spare. A single 90-minute interview fits in the $6 pack (500 minutes). The first 20 minutes of your first file are free.
My camera files are large. What is the limit?
Each interview file can be up to 10 hours or 5 GB. Before a pack is bought, uploads stop at 2 GB; files above that start after a pack is added. Exporting the interview's audio or a small proxy keeps every file well under the limit.
The interview was shot on two cards. Do I join them?
Upload each card's file as it is if that is how you will cut it, or join them first if you want one transcript with one clock. A single file only needs splitting if it runs past 10 hours.
Some subjects answered in their own language. Is that handled?
Yes. 99 languages are detected automatically, so each interview is transcribed in the language spoken without any setting.
What formats can the edit team use, and is unreleased footage safe?
DOCX and TXT for the paper edit, SRT and VTT for review copies, JSON for tooling. Unreleased material is handled privately: recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training.
Related
Related pages.
Start the edit with every word on paper.
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