Logging workflow, how to get youtube transcript from subtitles question

[Videojournalist]

Hi, I'm a journalist and I've moved into video. The fastest logging process I've come up with is to get youtube subtitles from my on-camera interviews, so I can copy and paste them, and the time stamp, into a word document. This will be the log of my interview and my interview transcript. Great. Free.

The problem is, how do I get the video as fast and easy as possible from my SD card on my camera into youtube?

Right now I'm downloading footage like normal, backing up. Then I choose a random program to put the video file into. I have VCL, Quicktime, Premiere Pro. Then I export in some random format. Then I try to upload to youtube. Sometimes it's worked, sometimes it's been too slow, and sometimes it's not worked (VLC, some QuickTime files) but it's taking forever and I don't know the whys/hows.

Right now I'm trying this out in Premiere/Adobe Media Encoder. But it churned out a huge MPEG-4 movie 381.7 MB file that will take a long time to upload into youtube.

I'd like advice on(1) if there's a better way to log and transcribe interviews that's faster and better, (2) how to turn the RAW camera files into the smallest, fastest uploading file as quickly, cheaply, easily as possible. (3) Any thing I should know about uploading this file into youtube. I'm just dragging and dropping.

Thanks in advance!

[Videojournalist]

I just exported from Premiere Pro/Adobe Media Encoder into Quicktime file and got the size down to 1.46 GB, and the export time was fast; but the youtube uploader is not working quickly. There's not a time estimate, but it's just at 1% now. Dimensions: 720 × 480 CodecsV/DVCPRO - NTSC, Linear PCM, Timecode. I'm going to look for a smaller file type.

[jagabo]

If you only need the subs from youtube reduce the frames size and use fast low quality codec to get a small file for upload.

[Videojournalist]

Thanks Jagabo. It looks like my upload speeds are lower than average. I'm in a rural area. I did a speed test and I can't remember the results, I think it was .2 to .5 depending on the test.

What frame rate do you suggest? I think I'm at 29. Thanks again.
What Codec do you recommend? They're all the same to me at this point

Right now I'm using another method recommended by a doc. maker. You dictate the video interview by talking to Siri on you iPhone in an email. It's slow, but faster than typing/rewinding and faster than my current upload speeds. You lose timestamps though.

I don't have a good method for logging broll. Any advice there is welcome too.

[JVRaines]

You could use Handbrake or VidCoder at a low quality setting to produce an AVC/mp4 file and scale down to a small frame size, like 640 × 360. The video can be lousy because all you want from YouTube is speech recognition.

[jagabo]

As a quick test I took a 40 second, 155 MB DV AVI file and encoded it with x264 at the veryfast preset, CRF 30, keeping the original PCM audio. It took about 5 seconds and the result was about 10 MB (about 1.8 MB video, the rest audio) MKV file. And that was keeping the original 720x480 frame size.

[jagabo]

Another example: a 1 minute, 222 MB DV AVI file downscalced and converted to a 4 MB MP4 (x264, aac) with ffmpeg in about 5 seconds with a batch file:

"g:\program files\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg" -i %1 -vf scale=w=320:h=240 -vcodec libx264 -preset veryfast -crf 25 -acodec aac -b:a 128k "%~dpn1.mp4"

You can drag/drop videos onto the batch file to convert them. You'll need to change the path to ffmpeg.