I’ve finally reached the end. It’s been a long long long time. Hitting a big milestone. What a great way to start the year.
So script splitter. It’s a website that splits a body of text by the amount of characters you provide. This project is essentially an application I wanted to create because it helps out a ton with a problem I have and I’m sure it can be utilized by many other assistant editors out there. The problem (or tedious job) is captioning videos.
It’s one of those jobs that’s pretty easy to do, necessary for the final project, but so time consuming and tedious. This application won’t caption videos for you (yet) but it will definitely help you along the way.
I would imagine this application to work best for videos with one speaker or for non cinematic videos. So web shows, instructional videos, commercials, speakers, lectures.
So to get the most out of this application, you have to do some prep work. Take your script and remove everything from it aside from the dialogue. So things like actors name, location, descriptions of shots. Remove everything but dialogue. Figure out your preferred caption size. Things like how many characters you want in your caption. The font size and the actual font. And that’s pretty much it. As long as your script has dialogue and you know your caption sizes, the application will do the rest. It will split up your script into bullets in your preferred caption size and all you have to do is copy and paste each bullet into your video editor of choice. It saves you having to create a ton of captions and having you figure it out on the go, adjusting the words to fit and figuring out how many actually fit inside each one, for hours on end.
And for the non video editing people, imagine you have a sheet of grid paper. 80 rows and 80 columns. And your job was to take these giant block of text, let’s say a couple chapters of your favorite book. And you had to write these chapters on multiple sheets of this grid paper, use every row but you can only utilize columns 20 to 60. Each line you need to write has a maximum of 40 squares long and you can’t cut off words in between. Maybe now you’re starting to understand what some assistant editors have to do. This application helps remove some of the thinking behind this job and can save the user a ton of time.
What I want to do with this application in the future
In its current state, the captions are just list items with no real functionality. I want to add checkmarks to them so if this becomes a multiple day job, you know where you left off and can continue working on, on the next day. And I also want to add a section where you can enter it’s timecode. So if at any time you have to refer back to the video or the script, you know where to look. All optional things for the user but it will be provided if wanted.
This blog was a bit more relaxed but in the next one we’ll get more into React and how things were built.