Doug Lietz: Hi Doug, could you explain me what's your workflow? I would like to understand why you upload a video to Happy Scribe to generate subtitles if you already have the srt file. Thanks in advance!

Pau: Thanks for responding. I have over a 1000 English videos that my team of human editors have already processed on another platform (before Happy Scribe's launch). So... there are nice clean srt, txt and csv files, already available for all of them. The reason I still want to upload these videos to HappyScribe (preferably using the Transcription upload path instead of the Subtitles upload path), is so that I can use your language translation 'machine' to convert my (already-edited) English transcripts, into different languages. In other words, I really don't want to have to pay my team to have to edit the English transcripts again, this time on HappyScribe, when they have already done that on the other platform. One of the main reason's why it is important that I use human-edited English transcripts as my starting point, before heading down the language translation path, is because there are lots of specific brand names and niche specific words that should be corrected in English, before any machine translation conversion is applied.

By the way, I am really impressed with how your captions editor is able to closely time the foreign language subtitles to the English voice track in our videos. That is the main reason I jumped on board with you guys. Plus, I REALLY like that I can create individual workspaces for each person on my editing team, so they only have access to the projects I delegate to them, and not the entire collection of videos in my account.

Doug Lietz: Hi Doug, thank you very much for your detailed response and your kind words!

The reason why we don't offer translation for imported subtitles is because high quality automatic translation is pretty expensive and we would lose money. Right now, we offer translation for free because you have paid for the transcription previously (like a restaurant that offers a free drink if you order a menu).

So, if we add this feature we would not be able to offer it for free. I have created a Feature Request "Upload subtitles for translation" to see if there's interest from other users :) https://happyscribe.canny.io/feature-request/p/upload-subtitles-for-translation

Pau: I think you misunderstood what I am asking for. I will rephrase, shorten and simplify.

After I upload my English videos to HappyScribe using the Transcription upload path, what I want is to be able to upload my own (already edited) English transcript to replace HappyScribe's AI generated transcript. Ideally, there should be a checkbox option to tell HappyScribe NOT to transcribe my video since I will be using my own transcript. If anything, I would think this should reduce overhead for HappyScribe, since your AI transcription engine would not have to process these types of video uploads.

Doug Lietz: Okay! Thanks for the clarification.

I didn't understand that you would be happy to use your hours for transcripts that you already have. That was the reason I misunderstood you.

I'll chat with the team and check if there's interest from other users (we always try to prioritize the features that benefit the most users). Thank you for your feedback! Have a nice day!

Pau: Yes I am fine with using my hour credits in this use case. It means that I would not have to pay my (English) editors again, for human-processing of transcripts that they had already processed in another tool. I'm still getting good value because of how HappyScribe allows me to translate my English transcripts into other languages.

There are many new video publishing tools coming into the marketplace, and most of them include some level of machine transcription. As I evaluate these different tools, each of which focuses on their own unique features and benefits, there is a growing case for being able to "bring-our-text-transcripts-with-us," so to speak. I see this sort of request happening all the time from others in similar situations to mine... where they have already paid human editors to process long text transcripts, and therefore, don't want to have to pay them again, every time there is a use-case for re-purposing our same videos in a different tools.

Pau: I am also in Doug's situation. I have one class that I used another platform for, and would like to do other translations. I am more than happy to use my credits to import the video, and then import the corrected .srt file. Please please consider this!

Pau: Any way to do this yet? I am at the stage where I REALLY need this. Is there a work around you can suggest? Would it work to completely delete the HappyScribe transcribe... then copy and paste my non-timecoded text only edited transcript... and then use the HappyScribe "Timecode" button to have HappyScribe add time codes to my transcript?

Doug Lietz, Trish

Thanks a lot for your feedback :) For what I understand you have two main needs:

Let's move the discussion to those two separate feature requests :)

Regarding "Translation from imported subtitles". It is quite aligned with our vision for Subtitles Translation. We will likely make it happen but I cannot really commit to any timeline.

As for the second one (import a script and convert it into subtitles), we do have a hidden experimental feature that could work for you Doug Lietz, I'll reply to your email with more details. Trish, if you are also interested, reach us out at hi@happyscribe.co and we will enable it for you too.

Yoel Cabo: - Thanks so much for your attention to this matter, and for your follow up email message. I just responded...

Anne Miles: Yeah, I saw they recently added the function to import your own SRT files. I was excited for that initially, but realized we can't attach it to an existing project/video and found the workaround as you described.

Although better than nothing, it is much more time consuming than being able to be able to upload an edited video to the original project as we need to download the subtitles from that project, then upload the subtitle SRT file as a new project, then upload the newly edited video, wait for it to load properly, then customize the look of the subtitles again. This workaround, despite being more time consuming, is better than not having one at all, and made the difference between refunding codes or not, but hopefully they look at giving us a better option.

Maria Zenagui Glaili: Thank you Maria.

Maria Zenagui Glaili: Another reason we need to be able to replace video: I usually upload a Handbraked 960x540 version to HS, rather than a full HD version. One time I thought that the video was short enough, and was already in Dropbox, so I skipped doing the low-res movie. Well, the movie won't play properly - which I didn't notice until I was halfway through editing the subtitles. I would have loved to be able to just "swap in" the lowres version for the HD version, and see if that fixed it, rather than do the workaround mentioned above.