Create transcription for DaVinci Resolve with Amazon Transcribe
DaVinci Resolve is my №2 favorite video editor. The №1 is 剪映 from ByteDance, the company behind TikTok. Both of them are free to use and very powerful. DaVinci Resolve is a bit overwhelming and hard to use, but I am quite happy with it.
One feature in 剪映(JianYing) I missed a lot in DaVinci Resolve is the auto-transcription. When you edit a video with lots of talk, such as product demo or tech talk, the most productive way to edit the timeline is based on the audio track and the subtitle track. You can easily identify which parts to trim, or fine tune. Comparing to watch the video track, this could be 10x quicker. Believe me.
I recently need to help my colleagues to edit a tech talk. I decided to use DaVinci Resolve since it’s almost a 1-hour-long video and I like the proxy handling in it.
Long story short, I’d like to generate the transcription for the raw video, but DaVinci Resolve doesn’t provide this feature. There are some 3rd party solutions if you Google it. Even one of the interesting solution is to render a low-fi video and upload to YouTube as a private video, then have YouTube to generate the subtitle.
If your team happen to be using AWS, read on to learn how to generate subtitle via AWS.
Step 1, export the audio file in DaVinci Resolve
Go to the Deliver tab, and choose to Audio Only option. You can choose a low data rate. Export it as mp3, since Amazon Transcribe doesn’t all formats.
Step 2, upload the mp3 to S3
Make sure you are using the same region for the S3 and Transcribe. Most of AWS services don’t support cross-region support.
Just use you browser to upload the mp3 to the right bucket&folder.
Step 3, create a job in Amazon Transcribe
Go to https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/transcribe/home?region=us-west-2#jobs with the proper region. Click Create job.
Set the S3 URI or use the ‘Browse S3’ dialog.
It may take 10 minutes to generate the transcripts, depending on the audio length. When the job is complete, you can download the transcript files.
Step 4. Import the transcribe in DaVinci Resolve
Open the Edit tab. Choose the menu: Import-> Subtitle..
After it’s imported, drag the subtitle to your timeline to create a subtitle track. Zoom in a bit so that you can see the subtitle clearly in the timeline editor.
Now you can productively edit the video, even without a headset. ✌️
