Hello I'm Neil and I help as many people as possible to get ideas out of their heads and
out into the world to make more people laugh because I think we might need it at the moment...
Welcome back to the Happy Hut: in this video, this will definitely help get some happy ideas
out I'm hoping that you've stumbled upon this video...
"Upon?!" ...because you're searching for how to transcribe a video for free and - that's
right for free!
This is the way to do it - it's a really brilliant method I've been using it for about a year
now and oh my goodness it saved me so much typing... so much grief... and it's so easy
All you need is a YouTube account and if you're watching this I'm taking a wild gamble that
you have a youtube account so let's dive in and I'll show you how to do it.
So this is the video that I want to transcribe It's a video of me on BBC News 24 from a hundred
years ago back when I had hair.
And I wasn't looking for a free transcription service.
I wasn't actually looking for a free transcription app or websites.
I just wanted to get to the subtitles file that contained the subtitles that YouTube
auto generates every time you upload a video.
Let me back up a bit.
Every time you upload a video to YouTube whether it's public or private it automatically auto
generates a transcript.
That's why when you press on this button here the subtitles or closed captions button it
brings up the subtitles that it has automatically detected
Let me play a bit of this video just to show you what I mean.
[VIDEO PLAYS] So let's pause it there.
This is absolutely amazing it's got better within the year
I'm recording this at the end of 2019 - I swear in the last six months, the standard
of the auto-generated subtitles is just phenomenal.
And it even manages to capture English accents, and as you can hear here: a Scottish accent.
I mean we're all speaking slowly and clearly and sometimes when I go a bit southern England
it struggles to keep up but by and large it pretty much captures all the words that are
in the video and as you can see on this line here the only word it couldn't catch is the
brand name Perrier.
So all I wanted to do was to get a transcript which is auto-generated out of YouTube so
that I could use it as a transcript on my blog or I could even put it back into YouTube
as my own correct subtitle file where I've corrected the words that it's struggled with.
At an extreme you can even use this to transcribe a video and use that transcript to release
a book.
I even managed to release an entire book on Amazon based on that: it's a chat with my
dad about being a taxi driver in the 1960s in London.
[VIDEO PLAYS] I ended up releasing that as an entire book
that transcript there and that was all from capturing the auto-generated captions - getting
them out of YouTube - and you can publish on Amazon if you wanted.
It's a brilliant technique for just transcribing any words - any thoughts that you want to
have written down this method is by far and away the best that I've found.
And also if you interested in writing it's often a lot easier to say the thoughts out
loud and to then afterwards turn that into some kind of transcription and use that text
as a thing to edit rather than having to write it out by hand or type it.
It does help to speak freely off the top of your head and then capture those words and
use that text to edit later.
So anyway if you want to look at that video that's that's up above and if you click on
the "i" it's there, but let's go back to the video that I want to transcribe this BBC News
24 report.
[VIDEO PLAYS] This BBC talent scout says comedians treat the festival as a trade fair it isn't
the only way to develop your career.
Hey, there I am back in the 1990s with my chunky oatmeal knitwear
Let's use this vision of turmoil to capture the transcription I'll show you exactly where
to go.
Firstly you need to upload your video or your recording to YouTube.
There are lots of other videos on the internet to show you how to do that
I'm gonna assume that you've already got the video up.
It doesn't have to be public - it could be unlisted so nobody need ever see this.
You can do this with mp3 recordings but you have to transfer - I'm talking at the end
of 2019 - at this stage you're not allowed to upload mp3 recordings to YouTube.
So what you'd want to do there is to convert it to an mp4 file or some kind of video file
and then upload back to YouTube.
Once the video is in YouTube - and you can see it - give it a couple of hours.
It takes about an hour to for the subtitles to appear.
This has been uploaded for a couple of days now - I can tell that the subtitles are here
quite easily by clicking on the subtitles button down here
You can turn them on and off there.
So to get to the transcript what you need to do is to look at these three buttons here
I'll zoom in for you on the screen There they are - see those three three dots?
This is actually a little menu so if you click on that there's "report" don't press that
okay!
That won't help!
Go down to "open transcript" Kerching!
And there as if by magic on the top right hand corner of your YouTube page you'll see
it's even labeled "transcript" It's quite clever this because when the video
plays you can see it scrolls for you Now what I did at first was to just drag my
cursor down here the trouble with this as you can see is that it's also capturing the
time codes So if I copy that paste it into pages here
on a Mac or into Word - if I paste that you can see that it's brought up all of the, the
times There is a really easy way to get rid of that
Next to the word transcript in that box on the top right hand corner next to transcript
there's another three dot menu Those three dots are upwards.
Wonder if that means something.
If you click on that it brings up the option for toggle timestamps.
(Laughs) I, I think i'd like to call my third child toggle timestamps
But if you click on toggle timestamps guess what?
It toggles the timestamps so all we need to do is scroll up to the top and I'm gonna drag
clicking down on my mouse and just dragging all the way down down to the final words which
are "thank you Phillip" And then I'm going to hit copy, which for
me is the command button and "C", or you can right click on your mouse go down to "copy"
then go over to my word processor.
Now on the computer I'm on (Macbook Pro) it's a program called pages if you're on a PC you
might have a word processing program like word.
So I've pasted in the transcript and I don't if you can see but it has kept the sentences
truncated - it's kept the lines truncated as almost as if they are appearing on a screen
and it's put some hard returns in these lines.
Which doesn't look very elegant.
So you can take these out manually but that will take forever because you know even on
a short video that's over a page worth There's a quick way to do this.
This was really difficult to find on pages for Macs - you might have stumbled on this
video looking for "how to remove hard returns or carriage returns on Mac pages"
And the way to do it is this - if you click on find which is in the Edit menu go down
to find and then click on find you'll see it's brought up another menu saying find and
replace And what we're going to look for is a is a
special character so we have to type in the coding for it and the button that you want
to press is a backslash n (\n).
So here's the backslash it looks like that it's not the one underneath the question mark
which looks like that - it's the one that is under this weird line and it looks like
that.
And then the code letter is n So backslash n is going to find all of those
and you can see it's highlighted all of the carriage returns
Maybe n stands for new line I don't know But anyway so it's backslash N
And then in the replace line I'm going to hit space
I'll do it really loudly so you can hear me hitting the spacebar
There you go so it's going to look for all of the carriage returns that it's highlighted
and it's going to replace them with a space.
So if I hit "replace all"... Dah dah!
And as you can see it's giving you a complete transcript that flows.
Let me show you how to do that on Word.
You paste the transcript from YouTube into a blank document and similarly click on find.
And there the character the code character we need to find here it's like a 'hat' sign.
I show you a shot of that On my keyboard it's above the six and then
letter P - that means I think it means new paragraph or paragraph return
to all of those new line commands which are hidden in the text
If you go to replace and just hit space once and then "replace all" - it replaces all of
those paragraph marks with a space I wish I could find a way of doing this for
Google Docs.
I cannot find anywhere how to find the hidden code and replace it with a space
If you know how to do that in Google Docs please please please leave me a comment
I've skipped over some assumptions here like you know how to find the hidden characters.
I found the Invisibles, by going to view and then down to "show Invisibles"
There you go but if you have any other questions please leave me a comment
It would be lovely to hear from you anyway just say hi
And I hope this helps you transcribe any video or any recording that you want and turn that
into a transcription that you can use If you have reached this point in the video
I hope this has helped give me a thumbs up if you reach this point in the video be lovely
to know someone reached this far and if you're feeling even kinder you don't have to watch
any video of mine ever again but if you hit the subscribe button in the corner or on my
face it will help us reach our cherished goal of hitting a thousand subscribers and good
luck with your free transcribing I hope this does the trick and leave me a comment if it
doesn't Can you please help my daddy get 1000 subscribers
just click on his face, thanks bye!
How's that?