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itmeJP Community

Transcribing the RollPlay shows into scripts

itmeJP General
#1

Hi, I’m a long term fan who watched the Original RP with my laptop on the kitchen table at my mother’s house and listened to Swan Song on my MP3 player whilst cleaning toilets and dormitories at an activity centre. Putting those shows on still invokes fond memories of my mother’s cooking, and the toilets and dormitories at the activity centre. Joking aside, I have been around since 2003 Brood War and am still delighted to be around the gaming communities and everything that has sprung from them.

A few months ago I quit my job as a Flash developer because I was completely fed up with working for a car company. Since then I have really done nothing much productive with my time, up until two months ago when I signed up to become a transcriber at an online company. Transcription is when you listen to audio recordings and write down what you hear. It’s a lot harder than it sounds because you need to use hotkeys to constantly skip backwards and forwards, to confirm the exact words that people are saying, and then apply a bunch of formatting rules on top of it.

I don’t make much money, no more than £4/hour, if that, and naturally started wondering if I could do something different with the skill and (most importantly) my time spent doing it - since business transcription is highly time-consuming and pretty miserable if I’m at all honest.

So, to be brief now, I am wondering if JP - or any other person with the rights to that person’s own content - would be interested in permitting me to start transcribing some of their role play or talk shows?

The idea would be to write up a certain amount of content per day and release the script in whatever format you prefer. I would offer a Patreon page for people to support me and if this reaches a reasonable figure then I would be able to reduce my existing transcription shifts and pick this up full time.

I’m not sure what I have in terms of references to offer you, but I can provide a reference of my previous employer who can talk about my work ethic, and I can provide a lengthy sample of work if you would like to see what the end result should look like. Tonight after my regular work, I typed up the first 17 minutes of a party of Swan Song to give myself an idea of what it’d be like. You can find this here (scroll down and click on ‘Download original PDF file’ and it should open in your browser as PDF): https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/01/25/rollplay-swan-song-week-10-part-2/rollplay-swan-song-week-10-part-2.pdf

Thank you for reading! I am open to any suggestions from anyone regarding this and would love to begin right away by setting up a Patreon, delivering scripts and seeing how viable it really is.

Best regards,
Jon

Edit: This is cross-posted from https://www.reddit.com/r/itmejp/comments/5q4zil/i_started_transcribing_a_bit_of_swan_song/ (I didn’t realise this was a separate forum!)

3 Likes
#2

At the present, I do not have the time to read your documents at length, but I am a fan of the very idea of your work, and your interest in transcripting the Rolllplay shows in a written form.

We (the community) do have a wiki, where there are written summaries of the episodes. …

But this seems cool, and I’ll definitely read it properly when I can.

#3

Haha this is pretty cool. Can’t wait for someone to make this into a play one day.

#4

Tnx buddy, I didn’t read the summaries, I just had a peek today to get some of the name spellings :smiley:

A Reddit user suggested that I could convert the scripts into subtitles and that they could be handy for foreign-language readers who stumble every so often on what people are saying. Tomorrow if I have time I’ll finished up the little bit I was typing and see what the process is like in transferring it to Youtube subtitles

#5

I believe this is how Record of Lodoss War started. You’re on to something.

#6

Hey guys, I’m super stoked to bring you an update.

Not a full episode yet, but a good preview, and (if you guys remember anything about the start of Swan Song), I’m thankful to have the character creation section out of the way and expect the rest to be a lot easier to type up.

Writing up Swan Song Week 1 Part 1 took around 4 hours 30 minutes. The script is 9.900 words over 26 pages. I used macros to input player names and found it really fun to type.

Compared to work files that I’ve had to transcribe, the guys are all incredibly easy to understand and transcribe, it was just a long haul for this first part due to a lot of back and forth about character stats and whatnot. However, it does make me cautious for the future when I might have to consider cutting out the pre-game ramble, because an hour of back and forth chitchat could be too much. On the other hand, I do want to provide a “professional” style piece of work, and it would look weird having subtitles for just 4 parts of a 5-part show, for instance.

Onto subtitles. I didn’t consider converting the script to subtitles at first, but a Reddit user said it would be cool for foreign-language people who are not good at English to be able to read what the guys are saying, especially when there is a lot of cross-talk and subtle jokes that we struggle even in English to catch onto at times.

I haven’t used subtitles before, so figuring it out took a while. First I opened my MS Word document with Notepad++ then used extended Find & Replace to add a space between every line in order to restore line breaks, or something (whatever it was, it was important at the time). Then I used an add-on to reformat every line down to 50 characters in width, which is roughly an appropriate width for subtitles (have a look for yourself). The trimming options in the Subtitle Edit application were bugging out on me (that’s my excuse, anyway), so I had to come up with this other method, and it works just fine.

Next, I imported my text file into Subtitle Edit and set a hotkey that let’s me “push to go”, so to speak. With that, I have to listen to the Role Play video again whilst holding and releasing my hotkey for every line of subtitle, in order to assign it a timestamp. After about 20 minutes of this you start to get into the “zone” and figure out just when exactly to press the button each time, so it’s not so bad. (More importantly you stop twitching all the time and lifting your finger off the button by accident, lol). At the end, I went back through the first 10 minutes of the file to iron it out, and then applied the automatic ‘bridge gap duration’ option, just to iron things out. Along the way I also managed to patch up around 5 typos, which I also edited out of the original script.

So, what have I got to show you?

First is the script file in PDF format. Scroll down a bit to download it and open in your browser. MS Word version is available too, but, for right now, this is easy to share: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/01/30/rollplay-swan-song-week-1-part-1-1/

Second is the subtitled version of Swan Song Week 1 Part 1, hosted on my Youtube channel. This is unlisted and just for showcase purposes.

It turns out that attaching my subtitle file to the Youtube video is done with just two clicks of a button and not even 5 seconds of wait time. So, if JP is interested in attaching these to his series, it is actually a pretty viable thing to do. The end result is actually pretty awesome too (click on the subs button at the bottom of the video to enable it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoIIk5WKjLc

Last of all, here is the standalone subs file. If you don’t want to watch my totally illegal showcase version on Youtube, download this file (be careful to untick the download manager button there) and drag it into your media player when you’re playing a downloaded copy of Swan Song Week 1 Part 1. JP, if you’re reading this and want to go ahead and insert this file into Swan Song yourself, please feel free to. Just extract the .srt, navigate to Week 1 Part 1 of Swan Song, click on the Subtitle/CC option, upload the .srt and click Save: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/6869066/rollplay-swan-song-week-1-part-1-en

Thanks everyone for reading, if any of you bothered to read that wall of text. Honestly, I don’t think I can stop typing now. I’m on a roll. I think I lost some of my brain cells along the way, though.

In the next few days I hope to complete Week 1 Part 2, the same way (hopefully it’ll be a lot quicker from now on), and maybe make a 2 minute Youtube video of the process using Camtasia and then stick it on a Patreon page in case anyone wants to support this. Again, like I said, it’s up to JP whether or not this gets the go-ahead.

Anyway, thanks for reading guys. Let me know what you think (watch the youtube link, it’s super cool :stuck_out_tongue:)

Edit: Actually it feels sooo good to have done this, lol. Fuckin’ Swan Song, man. If you’ve ever wondered from time to time what the hell they’re talking about, the transcript is super fun :stuck_out_tongue:
Example: youtu.be/IoIIk5WKjLc?t=244

#7

Going to bump this up since @percydw got caught in the spam filter. :itmejphi:

#8

Hi guys, here is Week 1 Part 2. It took around 2 hr 40 to type and 50 mins to sub and proofread. I think Higgs said his first ever words in the moment when JP told Geoff that ‘Sicarian’ is too difficult to pronounce so he will call him Mr S instead :stuck_out_tongue:

Swan Song Week 1 Part 2
Preview video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfKO2ESYVcc
Script: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/01/31/rollplay-swan-song-week-1-part-2/
Subtitle file: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/6871256/rollplay-swan-song-week-1-part-2-en

Older files:
Swan Song Week 1 Part 1
Preview video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoIIk5WKjLc
Script: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/01/30/rollplay-swan-song-week-1-part-1-1/
Subtitle file: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/6869066/rollplay-swan-song-week-1-part-1-en

Thank you, guys XD