THL Toolbox > Audio-Video > Overview
An Overview of Working with Audio-Video
Contributor(s): David Germano, James Graves, Chelsea Hall, Eric Woelfel.
New developments in digital technology and the Web offer exciting new possibilities for the incorporation of audio-video into new areas of research, publication and teaching. They also allow us for the first time to use and explore audio-video creatively in ways previously only possible with texts, such as providing for powerful ways to search media files and giving users tools to creatively alter audio-video files to incorporate into their own work. However, working with audio-video can also be very frustrating, and thus THL has expended considerable energies in developing tools and documentation to provide a systematic framework for the creation, delivery and use of audio-video in research, publication and teaching.
For a beginner's lesson on how to use the AV Database website, please see: Using the THL AV Database.
The overall process from start to finish can be divided into five distinct phases:
- Create the audio-video through recording sessions
- Technically process the media into edited segments in formats usable on a computer
- Catalog the resultant media titles with metadata
- Linguistically process the media titles with transcription, translation, annotation and timecoding
- Package the media title into research publications, or into instructional units, including integration with reference databases, for delivery to end users
Given the demands of such a process, it is vital that an integrated set of tools with proper manuals and broader documentation are available which are free, open source, and suited for educational purposes. We are creating comprehensive documentation for each phase, which themselves involve a series of internal steps and processes often requiring separate documentation. As a whole, these materials form the basis for our training and reference with regard to audio-video materials.
A more practical overview:
1. Determine a title to be produced.
- Review/screen recorded material (i.e., video tapes) and decide how they might be broken down into discrete titles. Each title will be its own video. Consult standardized guidelines for generating titles, including standardized phraseology, etc.
- Generating Titles & Credits for Recordings
2. Propose a title (and corresponding credits for each title) and have them checked by Germano.
- (Typically, it's best to prepare a batch of titles and their corresponding credits, and submit that to Germano, rather than submitting titles to him one-by-one.)
3. Send the approved titles and credits to Penam in Lhasa, or a local Tibetan assigned to the task like Tsering Wangchuk and Tsering Perlo to be rendered into Tibetan and Chinese.
4. Meanwhile digitize and edit your titles in Final Cut Pro, inserting blank title and credit slates whose trilingual information can be added later, once translations are ready.
5. Complete catalog entries in BOTH the physical media (i.e., tapes) database AND Audio-Video database.
- Physical Media Database: Make sure the content of the tape is properly described in the physical media database. Also include the recording date, the tape format (i.e., NTSC, PAL, HD, etc.), and other useful data about the tape itself and its recording.
- AV Database: Give a short description of the title’s content, fill out the relevant metadata (like language, etc.), propose collection classifications if not obvious, & record as much information as you can about participants involved in your title, under the "Credits" tab of each AVDB entry
- Consult with a native Tibetan speaker to help process participant information on handwritten forms as necessary. (Often such forms are filled out in the cursive script, not dbu can, and may therefore be harder to understand.)
6. Compress each title in Final Cut Pro, making sure you've included ending credits. Upload the files to the server after compression and after converting the audio files to MPEG-3 and generating thumbnails.
7. Alert a Transcription Center that the compression is ready for transcription, and eventual translation.
8. If relevant, once transcribed, it can be further processed for use in an instructional unit or other presentational context (see making language instructional units).
NOTE: If possible, use the fields under the workflow tab in order to mark processes as completed. In addition, you should keep track of the workflow in a more comprehensive fashion using the status reports for av, ie: titles waiting to be approved, completed titles, etc. In the future, we hope the new AV database will allow for tracking of workflow so that everyone involved can easily fnd what titles need to be translated, etc. by using the database itself.
