jtweigandt
Well-Known Member
Got the go ahead from the board to try captions for Elf. So far I now have an ultra short throw 3500 lumen projector, and my reflective devices and chair adapter as in the previous thread.
The last piece of the puzzle was script transcription to powerpoint. I was dictating straight into the powerpoint file using an office suite on my ipad, but that was a lot of button poking to bring up microphone, advance to next slide etc.
With the help of a school tech resource guy on our board, We have blazed the trail and can maybe help others. Process is very quick now.
1 Google doc on an ipad or iphone, or presumably android. Literally just read the script, chopping into logical snippets, you simply say "new line" between each. Can have punctuation etc to your hearts content.
2. Download this doc as a .txt plain text. make your first line of the doc a label like "Lines" which you will need later.
3 Import into google sheets spreadsheet using a custom character like * as your "seperator" that doesn't appear in your doc and then punctuation and commas wont mess up your line breaks.
4 What you get is a single column spreadsheet with all your lines in a vertical column of cells.
5. Open Google slides and make a single slide template with your layout, black background font size and color. The text will be the merge word <<Lines>> which will be used to map and import your spreadsheet.
6. From Google sheets get the add on called Autocrat.
7 Open autocrat and use the sheets template, designate what file to create etc, and it will automatically make each line of your spreadsheet a new slide in the slides presentation.
You can do the actual presentation using Slides, or convert to powerpoint or libre office format.
The Autocrat step is the least intuitive, so I may post a video later of how to do that... but bottom line.. you can digitize your script almost as fast as you can read it.
I tried scan and OCR but taking out stage direction, stray paragraph seperations caused by lines, side by side text columns made it apparent pretty quickly that dictation was the key.
The last piece of the puzzle was script transcription to powerpoint. I was dictating straight into the powerpoint file using an office suite on my ipad, but that was a lot of button poking to bring up microphone, advance to next slide etc.
With the help of a school tech resource guy on our board, We have blazed the trail and can maybe help others. Process is very quick now.
1 Google doc on an ipad or iphone, or presumably android. Literally just read the script, chopping into logical snippets, you simply say "new line" between each. Can have punctuation etc to your hearts content.
2. Download this doc as a .txt plain text. make your first line of the doc a label like "Lines" which you will need later.
3 Import into google sheets spreadsheet using a custom character like * as your "seperator" that doesn't appear in your doc and then punctuation and commas wont mess up your line breaks.
4 What you get is a single column spreadsheet with all your lines in a vertical column of cells.
5. Open Google slides and make a single slide template with your layout, black background font size and color. The text will be the merge word <<Lines>> which will be used to map and import your spreadsheet.
6. From Google sheets get the add on called Autocrat.
7 Open autocrat and use the sheets template, designate what file to create etc, and it will automatically make each line of your spreadsheet a new slide in the slides presentation.
You can do the actual presentation using Slides, or convert to powerpoint or libre office format.
The Autocrat step is the least intuitive, so I may post a video later of how to do that... but bottom line.. you can digitize your script almost as fast as you can read it.
I tried scan and OCR but taking out stage direction, stray paragraph seperations caused by lines, side by side text columns made it apparent pretty quickly that dictation was the key.
