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July 4th

Get

An extraordinary meeting thanks to the presence of Adam Knight and (his boss!) Peter Ramsey from AV3 Software. They were here to give the first public demonstration of Get Phonetic Recognition Software. And what a demonstration: just about everything went wrong for Adam and the poor guy ended up using my old 2.4 GHz MBP and having to transfer hours, but hours of footage to my spare hard drive. But, in a nutshell, it all worked and Adam and Peter answered all the questions we could throw at them.

Get "analyses" the audio tracks of any video clip cataloguing all the different phonemes used. (In a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances. In some languages, each letter in the spelling system represents one phoneme. However, in English spelling there is a poor match between spelling and phonemes. For example, the two letters sh represent the single phoneme /ʃ/, while the letters k and c can both represent the phoneme /k/ (as in kit and cat)). According to Adam, the English language uses about 70 of the known 400 phonemes and thats spread across all the English dialects (American English, Australian English, Geordie... etc.) According to my wife (who knows about these things being an infant's reception class teacher) our "English" English only uses about 34 of them!

So, cutting to the chase, having "databased" all the different phonemes (i.e. phonetic sounds) within a video clip it can then cross reference them with the written word. Thus if, as we did, you type in the search panel words like "homologation" it pretty near instantly locates the whereabouts that word is spoken within the two video clips I'd given Adam but half an hour before. (It takes just 10 seconds to analyse an hour of video with audio, according to Adam.) Thats when jaws first dropped. So we did it again... and again using different words and even a string of words. And then with remarkable ease (i.e. with the click of one button) it can be sent into any open Final Cut Pro project. Cool... but very cool!

No system such as this can be 100% accurate and thats acknowledged by the ability to set a percentage "confidence" rate. We worked at >85% and so occasionally we got spoken words that were close but not exactly right. But thats to be expected and didn't distract from the fact that we were, on the whole, left pretty spell bound!

AVID users have had something like this in the past iterations of Media Composer (it was called "ScriptSync®") with the technology licensed from the American Software development company Nexidea. AV3 Software have also licensed the software from Nexidea and, only starting last March, have produced Get Phonetic in just a few months. Well, now we know how they monitor every phone call being made at GCHQ!

iPhone 4 and iMovie

We also had a rather fun demonstration from Simon Walker who, having shot arriving at Broadcasting House here in Bristol, then proceeded to edit it using iMovie for iPhone 4. Oh dear... we’re all out of a job. Here's his famous Vimeo creation:

Crumplepop

And we’ve launched our summer competition and I hereby declare it open to every editor in the world!

Can we have ideas for super cool plug-ins for Final Cut Pro that would fit in with the Crumplepop family of existing super cool plug-ins. We’ve created a special page where you can view them. They get a serious thumbs up from weFCPug!

Those bloody Vuvuzelas!

And lastly, using the wonders of software that is Garageband, Phil produced a chorus of Vuvuzelas playing our national anthem! You can hear it here! (When I get a copy from Phil.) Deep joy.

The next meeting is on the 13th of September and somewhere in the wilds of Blagdon at Coombe Lodge. It'll be a sort-of late summer barbeque/film showing. For further info please e-mail Phil or Richard.

..saw an extraordinary meeting with Adam Knight of AV3 Software flooring us all with Get Phonetic Software. There was also Simon Walker with a live shoot 'n' edit on his iPhone 4 and we launched the weFCPug Crumplepop Summer Competition. Oh, and Phil had the final word on vuvuzelas.