Text-based editing sounds like it refers to making changes to documents and articles. You might be surprised to learn that editing videos using a text transcript is now possible. Sounds crazy, we know, but hear us out.
With tools like Riverside’s text-based editor, you can now cut, change, and edit your video footage by playing around with the text in your transcript. This makes for a seamless, quick, and intuitive workflow that’ll improve how you edit videos.
In this article, we’re walking you through how text-based editing works and which tools you should check out.
TL;DR
- Text-based editing is sure to change the way your post-production workflow looks.
- Using a text-based editor, you can clean up, speed up, and streamline your editing process.
- Riverside’s text-based editor makes editing a video as easy as editing a Google Doc.
What is text-based video editing?
Text-based video editing is where you edit your video by making changes to a transcription of its audio. Just like editing a Word document or Google Doc, you can delete phrases or move text segments, and you’ll see these changes reflected automatically in your video recording.
Adding text to videos vs. using text transcripts for editing
While initially, it’s easy to believe text-based editing refers to adding text to your video, it’s important to distinguish the two.
Text-based editing is different from adding text to your videos. Adding text refers to overlaying a word or sentence onto your footage. Text-based editing means editing a text-transcript of your video in order to make changes to your recording. So for instance, any text you would delete in this transcript, automatically removes any corresponding video and audio in the recording you’re editing.
In this article, we’re focussing on using a text transcription of your video to make edits to your footage.
Benefits of editing video by editing text
Though text-based editing may be unfamiliar, there are several reasons so many creators are changing up their workflows:
Easier editing
Text-based editors actually make your life easier. Instead of scrolling through your video and pinpointing key moments, you can work directly with and manipulate the text. You no longer need to rewatch your recording a hundred times over. Also, getting precise cuts becomes much smoother when working with a transcript over a timeline.
This process is quick and intuitive, resulting in easier editing sessions overall.
Streamlined & sped up workflow
The knock-on effect of easier editing is that post-production will take less time. Since text-based editors mean you can quickly navigate the entire footage, you can eliminate delays and instantly hone in on interesting segments. Plus, you can quickly delete text, get rid of irrelevant portions, and achieve more defined edits. All of this combined will speed up your time from recording to publication.
Seamless navigation
You can seamlessly navigate your video and locate key segments using a transcript. Tools like Riverside offer a search feature that lets you input a keyphrase or word and highlights every instance of it throughout your video. This makes it far easier to identify sections that you might want to repurpose into shorter-form Clips for social promotion.
How to edit video with text using Riverside: 6 Easy steps!
Riverside’s Editor makes text-based editing easy. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Record your video using Riverside. When you’ve wrapped your session, head to your recordings page and wait for Riverside to generate a transcript of your video.
Step 2: Open the editor by clicking ‘Go to Editor’. Next, you’ll choose your video format. You can choose between Story, Post or Full Length.
Step 3: In the editor, you’ll see your transcript on the left and a preview of your video on the right. As you scroll through your transcript, you’ll see the playhead jump to the corresponding point in the video.
Step 4: If you want to delete a segment, highlight the text and hit the ‘Remove’ button. If you want to undo this, you can click ‘Revert’.
Step 5: If you want to search for a specific word or phrase, you can input this into the search box, and it’ll highlight every time that word is spoken in your video.
Step 6: When you finish editing, export your video.
4 Best text-based editing software to try
Riverside
You might be familiar with Riverside as a high-quality remote recording platform. Now with their new text-based editor, not only can you record studio-quality video and audio, but you can edit it quickly and easily.
Riverside’s text-based editor makes editing as easy as reading through a transcript. You can remove video segments just by deleting text. The editor also has a search bar so that you can find an exact phrase in your recording, and speaker differentiation makes it easier to navigate as well.
Once you finish trimming your recording, you can customize your layout, add a background and fine-tune audio. With our Clips feature, you can even turn your long-form recording into short, shareable social media content.
Price:
Riverside has four pricing plans:
- Free
- Standard - $15/month
- Pro - $24/month
- Business - Get in touch for pricing
Key features:
- High-quality audio and video recording. Up to 4K video and 48Khz audio.
- Local recording. Riverside records each participant on their own device, eliminating the risk of bad wifi ruining your recording quality.
- Multitrack recording of every participant for more control during post-production.
- Highly accurate automated AI transcription in 100+ languages
- Text-based editing for seamless and precise video cuts
- Search your transcript for key terms and easily navigate to those points in your video
- Automated speaker differentiation in your transcript
- Multitracks automatically sync even when you use text-based editing
- Easy to use and seamless interface for intuitive workflows
- Business plan lets you work alongside your team collaboratively
- Clips creator so you can effortlessly repurpose one recording into short shareable social media videos.
Learn more, or sign up to start benefiting from Riverside’s effortless editor.
Descript
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Descript is a recording, transcription, and editing tool that majors on text-based editing. They offer unique features such as a text-to-speech ‘overdub’ tool that lets you add words to your audio after the fact. All you need to do is type new words into the text-based editor, and then Descript will artificially create the dialogue using an AI voice.
They also offer automated filler-word removal. Bear in mind, though, that, unlike Riverside, Descript doesn’t offer multisync to ensure all your tracks remain aligned after editing.
Price:
Descript has four subscription tiers to choose from:
- Free
- Creator - $12/month
- Pro - $24/month
- Enterprise - Custom Pricing
Key Features
- Text-based editing for audio and video
- Easily rearrange your video’s layout by simply dragging and dropping
- Multitrack recording
- Overdub feature that lets you add new words into your recording by simply typing them in
- Filler word removal (automatically cuts out words such as ‘um’ and ‘uh’)
- AI-powered transcription
Adobe Premiere Pro
While Premiere Pro has a wide range of editing tools, this might be complicated to figure out if you’re new to editing. A beginner might be better off trying an easier platform like Riverside. Compared to Adobe Premiere Pro, Riverside also let’s you record remotely and edit within the same platform, making for a seamless, all-in-one workflow.
Price:
$20.99/month for Adobe Premiere Pro only. If you want access to all Creative Cloud apps then you can subscribe for $54.99 per month.
If you’re already using Adobe Premiere Pro as part of your workflow, it’s worth giving their new text-based editing feature a go. Their text-based editor helps you produce a rough cut that you can clean up using their wider range of other editing tools.
Key features:
- Powerful editing suite
- Automated transcription
- Text-based editing to produce a rough cut version of your video
- Quickly search for keywords within your video
Streamlabs
Streamlabs is a well-known streaming software. But they now offer a podcast editor which is all about making it easy to record and repurpose your content. You can convert pre-existing long-form content into social-media compatible Clips or record from scratch. You’ll find a whole host of features ranging from auto-subtitling, video editors, transcription and text-based editing.
Streamlab’s text-based editor doesn’t appear to offer multi-sync like Riverside which means you may contend with your tracks falling out of sync.
Price:
Streamlabs has two pricing plans:
- Free
- Starter - $12/month
Key Features
- Automated transcription tool that removes filler words and pauses
- Text-based editing of audio and video
- Auto-subtitling for your video
- Blog article integration so you can repurpose your videos into an article
FAQs on How to Edit Videos with Text
Where can I edit video with text?
Text-based editing is a native feature of Riverside’s Editor. Riverside automatically generates a highly-accurate transcript of your video which you can use straight away to edit your content.
What free video editing app has text-to-speech?
Descript offers an ‘overdub’ feature that lets you type words into your transcript and adds this into the audio using one of their ‘stock voices’
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