The FTW Transcriber’s Timestamp Appearance menu enables you to format the way timestamps appear in your transcripts.
By default, the FTW Transcriber’s timestamps look like this:
_10:34:27_
However, you can reformat this in a virtually limitless number of ways. Use the options on the Timestamp Appearance menu to make adjustments, and watch the real-time Preview to see how your timestamps will look. You will be able to save your changes only if you are a licensed user.
You can set up different-looking timestamps for different clients, and save them for quick retrieval later. This is helpful if you transcribe for multiple clients with different requirements. Click here for the Configurations help page for more information about saving settings.
On the Timestamp Appearance menu the first few options enable you to set the text that appears before, between and after the hours, minutes and seconds (HH, MM and SS). You can also choose not to display hours, minutes or seconds.
Under that, you can choose whether to include tenths, hundredths or thousandths of seconds.
Under that, you can choose whether to include frames. Frames are what film footage and video files consist of. When you watch a cartoon film, the characters are not really “moving” – rather, the filmstrip consists of a series of images shown in quick succession which create the impression of movement. Each one of those images is called a “frame”. Video files also consist of a series of frame images, normally around 25 or 30 per second for good-quality video. If a client sends you a video to transcribe and asks you to include frame numbers in your timestamps, check the “display frames” box. You will need to enter the number of frames per second that your video has. Your client is the best person to advise you of that. If he cannot, you can try to work it out yourself, provided that the video has on-screen timestamps that include frames. (Be careful not to confuse frames with fractions of seconds.) You need to start and stop the video repeatedly, finding the highest frame number that you can. If the highest frame number you find is 29, that means the video has 30 frames per second (numbered 0-29); if the highest frame number you find is 24, the video has 25 frames per second (i.e. 0-24), and so on. When you have calculated the number of frames per second, enter it in the “Number of frames per second” box.
Obviously when including fractions or frames in your timestamps, more precision is necessary to make the timestamps accurate. You will achieve greatest precision by completing your transcript first, then playing the video in real time and adding the timestamps manually using the timestamp hotkey, rather than relying on automatic timestamps.
At the foot of the menu are further options which should be self-explanatory. Via a workaround it is also possible to format your timestamps in many other ways by using the features of Microsoft Word. For example, to highlight all your timestamps, proceed as follows:
1 – on The FTW Transcriber’s Timestamps Appearance menu, set your timestamps to be italicized (or bolded).
2 – after producing your transcript, click on one of your timestamps.
3 – click Home in the top left, then find the “Editing” menu, then click Select, then “Select all text with similar formatting”. That will select all text in italics.
4 – click Highlight and all your timestamps will be highlighted. If you do not want your timestamps to be italicized, click Word’s “italics” button to remove the italics.
The above method will work not just with highlights but with any other type of text formatting that Word permits such as font, font size, indenting, etc.