Media Transcription and Captions

Media transcription and captioning have one job in common: make spoken material usable without getting in the way of it. The difference is in the delivery. A production transcript needs to help an editor find the right moment quickly. A published transcript has to preserve quotations, names, and tone. Captions must be timed, readable, and placed so viewers can follow the programme without missing the picture. Our team has more than fifteen years of transcription experience across interviews, podcasts, documentary footage, and short-form video, and we know that each of those uses asks something different of the same audio.

We start with the destination. Tell us whether the work is for logging, editing, publication, accessibility, broadcast, or social distribution, and send your style guide, name list, or previous episode if you have one. For a documentary, we can work with timecoded rushes and identify interview subjects consistently. For a podcast, we can produce a clean transcript that still keeps the speaker's voice. For captions, we confirm the frame rate, format, and platform requirements before timing the file. SRT and VTT are common, but the real requirement is that the captions read naturally at speed and remain in sync.

Automatic captions often fail in predictable places: names, titles, music cues, overlapping dialogue, accents, and the sentence that starts before a cut and ends after it. A human reviewer checks those points against the source, not just against what looks plausible in text. We break captions for readability, retain meaning when speech is fast, and flag audio that cannot honestly be resolved. We can include non-speech cues when the brief calls for them. The finished work is not a machine export with a quick cleanup. It is a transcript or caption file made for the way your audience, editor, or platform will actually use it.