If you want to work with Final Cut Pro’s new ability to generate transcripts, then ScriptStar is a $10 tool for you. In my recent review of the Apple Creator Studio, which includes the latest update to Final Cut Pro, I noted that one of the more puzzling items was that while Final Cut Pro can now analyze files and create searchable transcripts, there is really not a lot you can do with those transcripts. If you work with Final Cut Pro, you know there is a robust third-party community building tools and extensions to expand Final Cut Pro’s capabilities. Now we have just that when it comes to accessing transcripts. Enter ScriptStar.
ScriptStar is really easy to use and works with either the Apple Creator Studio version of Final Cut Pro or the standalone version. Either launch the ScriptStar application or access it from the Extensions menu, drop a Library into the ScriptStar Drop Zone, and it will extract transcripts for clips that have been transcribed. If you’ve already organized your project, you can tell ScriptStar which events to process. This is useful if you have FCP analyze any media that’s imported for transcriptions, but say you only want to work with interviews. Put interviews in their own event, and that’s all that ScriptStar will process.
One interesting feature is that you can associate an SRT transcription file with clips. This can be useful if you’ve had transcriptions done elsewhere, including transcriptions in a different language (As of this writing, Final Cut Pro only transcribes in English)or human-created transcripts where you need 100% accuracy. Hit go, and ScriptStar will do its thing, creating a new event with the extracted transcription data.
ScriptStar will create a new Event and add a ⭐ so you know where to find the work it has done. There you’ll find the transcription data as Favorites , ready to audition, search, playback, and edit.
There’s a lot you can do here. If you highlight all of these ScriptStar favorites and toss them into a new timeline, you’ve then got a string out of the entire interview, minus pauses and things like that. In the Donuts Dynamite interview above, courtesy of our friends at EditStock, I had turned off automatic transcription analysis and only had Final Cut Pro analyze one angle of the multicam and hide the master clips. I then created the multicam clip and used ScriptStar. Now I have a multicam clip that transcription by ScriptStar.
Another really useful feature is the ability to export that transcript as a PDF, text file, or a CSV.
This is one of the big things I think that was missing from Apple’s original implementation that I noted in my review. It’s being able to send this transcript over to a client to begin a paper edit or just to highlight good sound bites. This can give a nice jumpstart on the editing of documentary or anything with interviews.
What’s missing? I don’t know if I would call this true text-based editing. As you can’t have an interview sitting in the timeline and then be able to edit text and have that update those edit changes in the timeline. And it would be really nice if ScriptStar could label the speakers so you could easily see when your subject is the one speaking versus when the interviewer is the one speaking. That would save a lot of time when narrowing down sound bites. But for $10, it’s a great bargain and a must-have for anybody working with transcripts in Final Cut Pro.
ScriptStar was created as a collaboration between both PVC’s own Iain Anderson and Late Night Films’ Chris Hocking. Chris is the creator of the legendary CommandPost and one of the foremost developers of tools for Final Cut Pro. He’s got a ton of documentation on ScriptStar, so give it all a read if you want more details. ScriptStar can be purchased directly on the Mac App Store.
