Review: Avid's Phrasefind & AV3's GET

I thought it appropriate to combine both products in one review as both are based on the powerful Nexidia phonetic search engine and are tools that will essentially change the way we edit. Nexidia, by the way, is well-known in the IT industry for its work in developing phonetic search technologies.

Being on two different editing platforms, the software offerings are not exactly competitors as much as siblings... in rivalry.

To me, dialogue speech recognition is among the most exciting new product categories in recent years. These programs will save larger production companies thousands in transcribing costs (at least in transcribing with timecode), and editors will now be able to search in seconds and “frankenbite” with ease. Independent documentarians and filmmakers will quickly wonder how they ever got along without this technology.

Briefly, the concept for both is simple yet almost magical: type a word or phrase into a search window and voila! You are taken to all incidents of that word (if spoken) in your clips and bins — more or less.

Obviously, mitigating factors such as sound quality, background noise, intelligibility and accents can throw off both programs’ accuracy, but on one (GET) you can dial-in the percentage of accuracy you are willing to accept. But dial it high and you will get less hits, dial it low and there will be a lot of imposters. read more...