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No. InqScribe does not incorporate speech-to-text technology.
You can install a single InqScribe license on both your desktop and laptop computer, or home and work computer, so long as only one copy is used at a time. In other words, a single license entitles you to run one active copy of InqScribe.
The license codes are valid on both the Macintosh and Windows versions of the software. If you own both a Macintosh and a Windows computer, you do not need to purchase 2 licenses. You only need to purchase a single license. You may use the same license on both computers as long as you will only use one computer at a time. Here’s how you do it:
Note that you can only use one machine at a time. You may not use both machines simultaneously as that would be a violation of the End User License Agreement.
Beginning with version 1.5, InqScribe directly supports most USB foot pedals. While we can’t guarantee that InqScribe would work with every USB foot pedal on the market, we are in the process of building a list of confirmed compatible foot pedals.
If you have a pedal from another manufacturer, please download our software (it’s free to try!) and just try it with your footpedal. If you find that your foot pedal works, please let us know! For more information on foot pedals, please visit the foot pedals documentation page.
Currently our list of supported pedals includes:
These pedals are known to NOT work with InqScribe:
The names InqScribe uses for your USB devices come from the underlying USB device drivers. It turns out that most foot pedal device drivers were originally created to control other kinds of input devices, like joysticks or gamepads. Their names either reflect the original input device or the company that originally wrote the driver.
In other words, don’t worry about it. InqScribe doesn’t actually care what your USB input device is, as long as it has buttons that can be assigned to shortcuts. If the misnomers really bother you, contact the manufacturer of your foot pedal.
Nope. Foot pedals are useful but InqScribe was original designed to support keyboard-based control of media playback. You can get by just fine with keyboard-based shortcuts.
We don’t have specific recommendations about where to buy your foot pedal. Generally, we suggest use a search engine to look for one of the pedals named above. There are plenty of online foot pedal vendors.
The main difference between a “Site License” and a “Single User License” is that with a site license you get a single license code that’s good for all the computers covered by license. With individual licenses, you’ll get, say 5 different licenses, one for each computer. It may or may not be a little more hassle to manage, depending on your setup.
The discounts for site licenses and single licenses are the same until you reach 20+ licenses. So if you’re interested in purchasing more than 20 licenses, a site license can give you a better discount.
The other minor difference is that site licenses are a little more trouble to process just because we have to do some paperwork.
If you would like to purchase a site license, we need the following information:
1. Name to go on the site license. (e.g. “Thinq Films”)
2. Address for the site license.
3. A location description where the licenses will be used (e.g. “Post Processing Lab”).
We shipped InqScribe 1.5 with a built-in evaluation license that expires May 1, primarily because we were distributing 1.5 demos on CD at a conference where people wouldn’t have online access to request their own evaluation license.
In addition to the built-in license, you have the right to request a personal evaluation license. The personal evaluation will expire 4-6 weeks from when you request it.
Yes. InqScribe 1.5 (and later) uses Windows Media Player to play back .wmv and .wma files. Windows users may even set Windows Media Player to be their preferred media player for all content that is not QuickTime-exclusive. (However, we recommend using QuickTime as your preferred player because it offers a few more capabilities.
Mac OS X users who need to play Windows Media files can download the free Flip4Mac WMV QuickTime component. This enables playback of .wmv and .wma content within QuickTime.
No. Currently InqScribe does not support the RealPlayer format. We are considering it for a future release if there is enough interest. Contact us if you want us to add it.
No. We would love to support DSS, but it is a proprietary format owned by Olympus, and they don’t seem interested in letting third party developers do much with the format.
Your best bet is to convert your DSS files to WAV files. Olympus has a FAQ explaining how to do this using their DSS Player software. InqScribe handles WAV files just fine.
Not yet. We’re working on it.
If you really need to work with DVD content, the workaround we recommend is to use a utility like Handbrake (for Mac OS X) or DVD Decrypter (for Windows) to rip the video from the DVD to your hard drive. You can then use InqScribe to work with the hard drive version of the content, and your time codes should align with the DVD version.
The goal is to convert the DVD to an MPEG4 file. There is a great article at Lifehacker that walks you through the conversion process for both Windows and OS X users. Follow Steps 1 and 2. Instead of Step 3 (opening iTunes), you’ll open InqScribe and select the MPEG4 file via the “Select Media Source...” dialog.
There are two possible reasons why Pitch Lock might not be functioning as you expect. First, it’s important to note that pitch locking is set for a given media source at the time the source is opened. (This is a technical limitation.) So if you change the setting for Pitch Lock in Preferences/Options, you will need to use the Reload Media menu item to re-open your media with the new Pitch Lock setting.
The other reason Pitch Lock might not be apparent is that adjusting the pitch in real-time is a fairly intensive process, and gets more difficult the farther away from 1x speed you go. If QuickTime gets to a point where it can’t adjust the pitch and maintain fluid playback, it will stop adjusting pitch.
Individual remote control buttons will enable or disable themselves based on the underlying capabilities of the media player and attributes of the media source. For example, if you connect to a real-time network stream, the rewind button will be disabled because you can’t rewind a real-time stream.
A common situation in which disabled remote control buttons appear occurs on Windows computers. If you set Windows Media Player to be your preferred media player, you may find that when WMP opens non-Windows Media content (such as .mp3 or .avi files), some buttons are disabled. This reflects the fact that WMP provided limited support for non-Windows Media formats. This is one reason we recommend using QuickTime as your preferred media player.
InqScribe calculates time code based on the elapsed time of the media file you’re playing. (If you need a non-zero start time, you can set it manually in the Select Media dialog.)
Starting with InqScribe 2.0 (due out shortly), InqScribe will be able to read two kinds of digital media files that contain their own time code information:
1. Quicktime movies that have their own time code track. Footage imported into Final Cut Pro, for example, has such time code tracks.
2. BWF WAV audio files.
In both cases, all InqScribe 2.0 does is pull out the start time information (and the time code format – NTSC, PAL etc. – if it is available). InqScribe still uses elapsed time to calculate the current time code.
If you have a specific time code format you’d like us to support, let us know.
If you’ve turned up the volume in InqScribe and your computer all the way, and your media is still not quite audible, you can try some sound processing utilities to increase the volume of the file. Our users have reported success with GoldWave for Windows machines.
On Mac OS X, F1 through F4 are reserved for Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste, respectively. Unfortunately we can’t change those settings. So if you assign one of those keys to a snippet or a shortcut, what happens when you press the key is, first, Mac OS triggers the underlying editing action, and second, InqScribe senses the keypress and triggers the snippet or shortcut. Generally, this is not what you want, so we recommend avoiding F1 through F4 on Mac OS X.
On Mac OS X, the file called ‘HID.bundle’ is used to enable USB input device support. This file must placed in the same folder as the InqScribe application. If it is missing, foot pedals, gamepads, and other USB devices will not be recognized by InqScribe. If you’ve lost this file, you can get another copy by downloading the latest version of InqScribe. HID.bundle is part of the download package.
HID.bundle was required if you wanted to use foot pedals or USB devices with InqScribe 1.5. But with InqScribe 2.0, you no longer need it.
Currently, subtitling is only available when you are working with QuickTime-compatible content. This is because InqScribe relies on QuickTime to convert your transcript into a text track and add that track to your movie.
This means that subtitling is not currently available if you are working with .wmv or .wma content, since QuickTime can not play Windows Media format files.
If you are working with another media format and the Export Subtitled File... menu item is still disabled, make sure that you have selected QuickTime as your preferred media player in the Options dialog.
Yes. You can use QuickTime Text Descriptors to accomplish this. What you need to do is add the following tags immediately after each time code in your transcript, like so:
[00:01:00.00] {scrollIn: on}{continuousScroll: on}
This caption will scroll.
[00:02:00.00] {scrollIn: on}{continuousScroll: on}
This caption will scroll as well.
Note that the “{scrollIn}” and “{continuousScroll}” commands need to appear on every caption. This is simply the way that QuickTime works. You can easily do a Find and Replace to insert them after each time code (e.g. if you’re careful about only using “]” for time codes, just search for “]” and replace it with “] {scrollIn: on}{continuousScroll: on}”.
You may need to play with the timing a bit to get the right effect. Note that scrolling subtitles work well if you place them beside the video: use the custom position setting in the Export Subtitles dialog to place them properly.
You can also do horizontal scrolling like so:
[00:00:00]{scrollIn: on}{continuousScroll: on}{horizontalScroll:on}
This caption will scroll.
[00:00:05]{scrollIn: on}{continuousScroll: on}{horizontalScroll:on}
This caption will scroll as well.
[00:00:10]
Though again, you’ll want to play with the timing and commands to make sure the scrolling works as you want.
For a full list of text descriptors you can use, see http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/textdescriptors.html.
InqScribe creates subtitled movies by generating a specially formatted text file and asking QuickTime to convert it to a QuickTime movie. This process is actually done twice during export: first, to figure out the overall dimensions of the subtitles, and later, to produce the final version.
This error message means that InqScribe asked QuickTime to convert the file to a movie and QuickTime couldn’t. This may happen because there are duplicate time codes in the transcript, or time codes not in chronological order: QuickTime is picky about those things.
This error can also occur if you are using square brackets [like this] for things other than time codes. While InqScribe understands that something like “[a:]” is not a time code, QuickTime can get confused, and we rely on QuickTime to do the fundamental conversion from text to a movie. So the best workaround – although obviously not ideal – is to make sure you’re not using square brackets in transcripts that you plan to convert to subtitles.
If you are using time code coloring, then you may see a very brief flash when the transcript is recolored and updated. This typically occurs a second or two after you’ve made a change to your transcript. If you find this flash distracting, you can turn off time code coloring in the Options dialog (in the Edit > Options... menu).