A narration becomes the words on screen, each one lit as it is read.
Give Clapperboard Sync a recording of someone reading and it can make the pictures itself: it transcribes the narration and fills the image lane with its text, timed to the voice, with the word being read highlighted as it plays. You set how the text looks and moves in the text inspector, and every change shows at once. The book's own text, when you have it, corrects what the transcription heard.
A narration on an audio lane. Speech, in a language your Mac can transcribe. Tools › Text from Narration is available as soon as an audio lane holds a recording.
Pages are optional. Without them, the words are the transcription's. With the book's pages on the image lane, or a PDF of it, the words take the book's spelling and punctuation — see correcting the words with the book.
The transcription runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.
Tools › Text from Narration opens the text inspector at the side of the window. The inspector button at the right of the toolbar, and View › Show Inspector (⌥⌘I), show and hide it. Each window remembers whether its inspector was open.
Four tabs sit at its top:
There is no Apply button: every change shows on the canvas and the lane as you make it. Each change is one step for Undo, named after its control — a whole slider drag, or a run of clicks on a stepper, undoes at once. The foot of the inspector says how many screens the style applies to. Before there is any text, the style you set is the one the first transcription uses.
The Text tab says whether the text is Up to Date, Out of Date — and why: a file of the narration the text doesn't include, or one with no transcript in the narration's language — or not transcribed at all. To transcribe says how much narration a transcription would still work through.
Transcribe Narration… opens the transcription sheet. Transcribe Narration… in an audio item's context menu opens it too, on that item's lane. In the sheet you choose the narration's language, what corrects the spelling, how verse is set, and whether to keep the pictures; hold the pointer over a choice to see what it does. Transcribe then transcribes the narration, reads the book if you asked it to, and lays the text out, under a progress bar you can cancel.
The text replaces what was on the image lane, as one undoable step. When the lane already holds something, Clapperboard Sync asks first and says how many items will go. Once there is text, the button reads Transcribe Again…, and its question warns that your edits go too. Undo brings it all back. To replace only the pages with text, keep the pictures.
Transcripts are kept. A second run — after correcting the language, say — goes straight to the layout, and an audiobook split into chapters is transcribed once, however many items it has become.
Transcribing in the wrong language gives nonsense rather than an error, so the sheet shows the language it will use, and holding the pointer over it says where the choice came from: the project, the book's text, the audio file, your last choice, or your Mac's language, in that order. Change it if it is wrong. The project remembers it, and Sync to Audio uses the same one.
The Layout tab. Screens show the text a screenful at a time. Each screen changes to the next halfway through the pause between them, so it arrives just before its first word is read and stays until just after its last. Each screen holds As Many as Fit, or A Set Number of sentences, chosen with Sentences per screen, with the type shrunk when they would not fit. Verse set line by line goes by stanzas instead.
Scrolling Text runs as one column that glides up, keeping the words being read near the same line.
Alignment sets the text left, centred or justified. Margins and Line spacing set the room around and between the lines.
The Spoken tab. Three marks show the word being read, alone or together, each in a colour of its own, set with the colour well beside it:
Fade words not yet spoken dims the words still to come, by the Fade amount you set, so the reading uncovers the text.
Movement decides how the mark travels: Jump to Each Word, or Slide from one to the next.
The Style tab. Family, Style and Size set the type; the size is in points on a 1080-line frame, so the text sits the same way at every export size. Text and Background set the colours.
A preset is a whole style — layout, type, colours and the spoken-word marks — saved under a name. Preset shows the one the style matches, or Custom, and choosing one sets the style to it. Three come with Clapperboard Sync: Book Page (Cream), Night and Large Print. Save… saves the style as it is under a name of your own, and asks before replacing a preset of the same name; the bin button deletes one of yours. Your presets are offered in every project.
The transcription hears the words, but not always how they are written: names, old spellings, punctuation, a word misheard. Correct spelling with, in the transcription sheet, puts that right from the book's own text — The Pages on the Visual Lane, or A PDF File chosen just for its text. A chosen file is only read, never shown or added to the project.
Where the book agrees with the narration, the words take its spelling and punctuation. Where the transcription misheard a word, the book's replaces it, but only when it looks like what was heard: a scan is often another edition than the one being read, and its different wording never overwrites what the narrator says. What the narrator says that the book lacks — a recording's introduction, an announcement — stays. What the book prints that nobody reads — front matter, captions, footnotes — is left out.
When the book matches nothing — the wrong file, or the wrong language — Clapperboard Sync says so, and the words stay as they were heard.
A scan's text has errors of its own: a smudge read as "Sa", "the" read as "ths". So a book word only replaces what was heard when the dictionary knows it, or when the narrator says it somewhere. Accept words the dictionary doesn't know also lets in words the book prints more than once — invented words, rare names — and with them a noisy scan's repeated errors.
A poem prints a capital at the start of every line, and flowed as prose those capitals land mid-sentence: "weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume". Two choices set how a book that is poetry shapes the text. Verse lines:
And, while the lines flow as prose, Capitals:
Both are in the transcription sheet, for the text to come, and in the inspector's Layout tab once the text carries a book's verse, where they change the text as it is, edits included.
The book's lines are read from its page layout: a new line with a capital starts a verse line, and a wider gap a stanza. A stanza that runs over a page turn keeps going, unless the narrator pauses there.
With the book's pages on the image lane, Keep the pictures, in the transcription sheet, replaces only the pages with text. Pages with little or no text — illustrations, plates, a cover — stay, each where it falls in the book: after the text before it, at the end of a sentence. Blank pages go, and so does anything else on the lane.
Whether a page counts as text is judged against the book's typical page, so a picture book whose every picture carries a verse keeps the verses as text.
Each picture takes its time from the start of the text after it, up to Show each for up to and never more than half of that screen. The words read meanwhile show as read when the text returns.
The pictures before the text — a cover, a frontispiece — open the video, and those after it close it, as long as the narration reaches that end of the book. A narration of one chapter, with the whole book on the lane, does not bring in the rest of the book's pictures.
Every word is tied to the moment it is heard in the recording, not to its text item. Move or trim the narration and the highlight follows. Move a text item away from its narration and it shows its words without a highlight. Split a text item and its words are divided at the cut.
Sync to Audio is unavailable while the image lane holds text: it retimes pages, and the text keeps its own time.
Change anything in the inspector, any time: the text keeps its words, edits included. Colours, the spoken-word marks and the capitals of verse change in place. A new font, size, spacing or way of filling screens, or keeping or dropping verse line breaks, lays the words out afresh in the time the text already had, and leaves pictures and other items where they are. In a long book that takes a moment: the screen under the playhead follows at once, the lane when the layout is done, and an export waits for it.
Transcribe Again… starts over: it transcribes again and replaces the text, edits included, keeping the pictures among it if you ask it to. Undo brings the old text back.
Remove Text…, in the inspector's Text tab, or Tools › Remove Text from Narration…, takes all the text off the image lane, edits included, after asking first. Pictures kept among it stay. The image lane is then ready for pages again: import the PDF or images as usual. The style stays for the next transcription, and Undo brings the text back.
Choose Edit Text in a text item's context menu, or double-click the item, to correct its words by hand. Words you keep stay timed where the narrator says them, even with new capitals or punctuation. A word you change takes the time of the one it replaces, and a new word is fitted into the pause before the next. ⌘Return saves.
Text exports like everything else, in videos and GIFs. A sliding or scrolling highlight moves on every frame, so while it moves the export renders frame by frame, and a long narration takes noticeably longer than with a jumping highlight. Final Cut Pro receives each text item as a still, without the highlight.