Simon Says Assemble Launched – Transcription-based Rough Cuts Made Easy

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by Jakub HanDecember 8^th, 2020

The transcription platform Simon Says today expands its offer with Simon Says Assemble – a new product that allows production teams and filmmakers to quickly create a rough cut of a story for further editing. Assemble can import and transcribe interview footage and dailies, highlight the key soundbites in the transcription, and you can then simply drag and drop the soundbite text into the desired order to create the story’s spine.

Simon Says is a timecode-based AI transcription platform that automatically converts spoken text in an audio track into written text. That makes it useful when creating subtitles, script, or translating a video. Simon Says can export to multiple formats for easy integration with most NLEs and it is compatible with many languages. Earlier this year, Simon Says launched the on-premise transcription tool, later the company added DaVinci Resolve integration. Today, Simon Says launches a new product called Simon Says Assemble – let’s take a short look at it.

Simon Says Assemble

According to its creators, Simon Says Assemble speeds up the process of building the story before even stepping into the edit suite. While transcribing, it enables users to search, highlight, order, and reorder soundbites directly in the transcript to add them to the timeline.

With a story locked, it can be exported to the preferred NLE (Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve). The XML automatically re-creates the assembled timeline and seamlessly relinks the media at the correct in and out points.

It saves time by eliminating scrubbing through audio to find a soundbite, flipping between highlights on a transcript, implementing edit notes, and exports trying to get signoff. Additionally, teams can edit, discuss, and sign-off on rough cuts from the web. These are the key features of Simon Says Assemble:

• Supports nearly all file formats and codecs
• Import from the web or natively from within Final Cut Pro X, DaVinci Resolve, and Adobe Premiere Pro
• Transcribe and translate in 100 languages
• Search and highlight soundbites directly in the transcript to add them to the timeline. Order and reorder soundbites freely as you preview playback.
• Collaborate with team members anywhere 
• Export to every major NLE and DAW to finalize the edit; the timeline/sequence seamlessly recreates
• Export to subtitles, captions, and FCP titles
• Metadata including file location, framerate, and start timecode are preserved through to export

Price and Availability

For existing Simon Says users, Assemble is available now via their dashboard. The company is offering a free demo and test version of Simon Says Assemble. The exact pricing has not been announced. We will update the article as soon as we get the information.

Do you use Simon Says transcription software? What do you think about the new Simon Says Assemble? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section underneath the article.