Feedback On Editing Camtasia Project Audio In Audiate And Audiate Exporting/Re-Synching/Adding Captions Back To Camtasia Project

as posted in the Camtasia Features Request section of the forum ...

Over the past few weeks, I've been testing the edit-in-Audiate function, I've made this round trip almost 300 times with different projects

Generally speaking, this functionality works really great; the developers have done an excellent job with the Camtasia/Audiate automation

Audiate's transcribing the project audio into text is nearly flawless; corrections are rare; I estimate the speech-to-text accuracy at better than 98%; many projects require no manual text corrections at all

Audiate does an excellent job of bulk-editing the silencing of hesitations, and the shortening of narration pauses

Audiate's wav form display makes fine-tune editing of audio glitches a snap

The Audiate export back to Camtasia perfectly re-synchs the original project with the trimmed audio

Some issues needing addressing ...

If the Camtasia project has multiple audio clips, the best practice is to export all audio as WAV, then replace the original audio with the full-project WAV; that WAV should be the audio edited in Audiate.  To make this process smoother, Camtasia needs a function to do the WAV export, silence original audio, and automatically import/put on timeline the replacement WAV; better still ... make it part of the edit in Audiate function

If the Camtasia project has places where there is no narration but important screen action takes place and needs to be preserved, then there needs to be a way for those sections to be able to be blocked from trimming/silencing when doing that editing in Audiate; a timeline object/property that can be applied to those sections of the project might be appropriate?  Just listening in Audiate is not sufficient as you cannot see the video action in Audiate

Audiate needs a way to use [again] the custom word function to define text strings that should define a caption string on export back to Camtasia; the current "always ADA complient" makes a disjointed mess of the caption display

Audiate inserts many "." and "..." in its text transcriptions; the "." do not accurately represent correct punctuation; the "..." [pauses?] cannot be removed by find/replace; Audiate needs a function to address and allow, pre-export, cleanup of this issue

The custom word dialog exhibits inconsistent behaviors; selected word[s] are [more often] not always already selected; the dialog cannot be moved and so often blocks the section in the transcript you're trying to edit; requires the transcript to be manually scrolled before the dialog is launched; sometimes, when playing the narration in Audiate, selecting a word in the transcript stops play; other times play just keeps on going

The custom word dialog indicates misspelling, but I can't find a spell checker correct-it function?

When saving an Audiate project that was sent from Camtasia, Audiate suggests a name that often severely truncates the name; it would be better if it suggested the full Camtasia project name

Bottom line ...

If you want captions in your Camtasia project, the Audiate round trip is the best way to go; initial SST is very accurate, and the time-to-caption a project, in my experience, is 3 to 5 times faster than other methods

If you have a lot of pauses and/or hesitations in your project narration, and you want to shorten the pauses and/or silence the hesitations to something more natural sounding, Audiate editing is the only way to go; all hesitations and pause shortenings are fixed instantly vs. one-at-a-time in the Camtasia project