Video content plays a key role in marketing, client onboarding, team training, and audience engagement. But the most effective videos are often long and dialogue-heavy. Creating high-quality webinars and courses is a real challenge, especially if your business lacks in-house digital experts.
Text-based video editing is the solution. This tool makes it easier to work with wordy video content like interviews and podcasts. You can edit and add text directly using transcripts, instead of spending hours or days sorting through clips, making dozens of minor edits, and trying to stitch everything back together seamlessly.
Join the many professionals now using text-based video editors to produce high-quality videos faster and cheaper. In this post, we’ll explore how these platforms work and explain how anyone can use them to create polished, professional content.
What’s text-based video editing?
Traditional editing requires you to navigate video timelines, make precise cuts, and manually sync audio and video. In contrast, text-based editors allow you to produce professional-quality media by editing text, just as you would in a Word or Google document.
When using a transcript-based tool, AI will automatically transform your recording’s audio into editable text. Once the process is complete, you can edit the video file by deleting sentences or rearranging paragraphs right in the transcript. If you want to remove filler words or cut out a mistake, you can simply hit ‘delete.’
Plus, some platforms automatically identify different speakers in the recording and incorporate that information into the generated transcript. This is handy for interview-format content, where you may want to pull social media clips or create full episodes that focus on one speaker.
What are the benefits of text-based video editing?
Transcript editing offers several advantages over traditional video production methods:
- Faster workflows: Text-based tools allow you to search transcripts for specific moments. You can also delete unwanted sections with a few clicks. This speeds up the transition from planning to posting.
- Better accessibility: Unsure how to edit a transcript? With these tools, it’s simple. Text-based video editing allows anyone on your team to tackle basic revisions using skills they already have. No more specialists needed.
- Easier collaboration: Most transcript-based video editing tools are cloud-based. Your team can work together to review transcripts, leave comments, and suggest edits. These collaborative tools speed up your video production process.
- More flexible outputs: Generate multiple resources, from social media clips to full-length webinars, all using the same source material. Instead of budgeting separately for each asset, text-based video editing tools stretch your resources further.
- Improved quality: AI-powered tools help you create more accurate video content and transcriptions. It’s simpler to identify filler words and mistakes, and to remove undesirable segments. The result is a higher-quality end product.
Some platforms offer even more. At Vimeo, we take these benefits a step further by combining text-based editing tools with professional hosting, detailed analytics, and seamless collaboration features.
Learn more about Vimeo’s text-based video editor →
Examples of text-based video editing in action
The above benefits translate into real-world advantages across many industries and use cases. Here are a few examples of how teams use these tools to save time and maximize quality.
Corporate training videos
Training videos often work best when split into bite-sized modules. You can take a longer session and break it into focused lessons based on key concepts, which you can quickly identify from the generated transcript.
HR teams also use text-based editing tools to create onboarding sequences from recorded sessions. This allows you to quickly respond to new training needs, boost adoption rates for new tools, and customize programs for specific roles.
Educational content
Transcript editing helps you convert long, unwieldy lectures into digestible segments. You can add captions for accessibility and create additional study materials using the transcripts.
With these tools, instructors can repurpose longer online courses into bite-sized lessons they can use in related courses. You’ll also save time and effort whenever recorded lectures need to be updated. Instead of re-recording from scratch, you can create a new clip and easily stitch it into the correct spot in the original video.
Social media posts
If you have a full-length interview or webinar, you can smoothly extract clips for social media posts to quickly highlight bite-sized promotional content. Smart marketing teams use text-based editing tools to quickly identify the most quotable moments from a recording and produce multiple assets from one video file.
Popular text-based video editing software
Text-based video editing software has transformed the way content creators and teams handle video production, particularly for dialogue-rich content such as interviews, webinars, and podcasts. These user-friendly tools make the editing process easier by enabling you to work with text, similar to editing a document, instead of dealing with complicated timelines.
1. Vimeo
Vimeo's text-based video editor is an effective tool aimed at simplifying the editing experience. Its AI-driven features allow you to transcribe your video file with speaker identification, facilitating easy edits based on the produced text.
Here are just a few of Vimeo’s key editing features:
- AI transcription with speaker identification, which is ideal for dialogue-heavy media like interviews and podcasts
- Automatic filler word removal, saving time and improving final product quality
- Video recording tools and library management, helping you handle large volumes of content consistently
- Intuitive and streamlined interface, easing collaboration and allowing for efficiency without sacrificing quality
Explore Vimeo’s text-based editor →
2. Descript
Descript is a favored text-based video editor tailored for podcasters and content creators. It provides transcript-based editing, allowing users to modify audio and video by altering the transcribed text. Descript also includes features like voice cloning, making it a flexible tool for diverse content creation requirements.
Compare Vimeo and Descript →
3. Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Premiere Pro is a renowned timeline-based video editor that has recently incorporated text-based functionalities. This enhancement offers users greater flexibility, enabling them to utilize text-based editing for initial cuts and then enhance their video with Premiere Pro's extensive traditional editing features. You can easily modify the font and style of your captions and text overlays.
4. CapCut
CapCut is a straightforward text-based editing tool that has become increasingly popular, particularly among TikTok users. It boasts a streamlined, mobile-first interface, making it easy for quick edits and content creation.
Compare Vimeo and CapCut →
How to edit videos with Vimeo’s text-based tools
Vimeo’s text-based editor allows you to edit, collaborate, and publish content in a unified workspace. Here’s how to get started:
- Upload your video to Vimeo: Our platform will automatically generate a transcript and identify speakers.
- Review the transcript in Vimeo’s editor: Our AI tool is incredibly accurate at transcription, so corrections should be minimal. Still, you may need to make tweaks to ensure full accuracy. Different speakers are highlighted in unique colors, making it easy to isolate specific contributors.
- Edit the video by modifying the transcript: You can delete unwanted sections by highlighting and removing text, or rearrange content by cutting and pasting paragraphs. Plus, Vimeo’s one-click filler word removal tool lets you clean up “ums” and “ahs” across the entire file. You can also generate auto captions to make the video more accessible.
- Collaborate with your team: Share the project with anyone who needs to review the transcript and suggest or approve changes.
- Generate final files: You can create multiple versions of a video that are optimized for different platforms, all from a single transcript.
- Time to publish: As soon as you’re done editing your project, you can embed it on your website or push it directly to key platforms. You also get access to detailed analytics on viewer engagement and performance, so you can see which content resonates best.
Get started with our text-based editor →
FAQ
Is text-based video editing faster than traditional timeline editing?
Yes, text-based video editing offers improved speed and efficiency. It’s particularly useful for dialogue-heavy content like interviews, webinars, training videos, and podcasts.
What are the disadvantages of text-based video editing?
Transcript-based editing works best for content with lots of dialogue. This approach doesn’t work as well for action sequences, music videos, or content that relies heavily on visual effects. You’ll also need recordings with high-quality audio to get the best results from your text-based video editing tool.
Can text-based editors handle large video files?
Most modern platforms can handle large files, although your processing time will go up. Always check your platform’s limits before uploading, and make sure your chosen tool can handle the type of videos you need to edit.
Save time and simplify production with Vimeo’s text-based video editing
Transcript-based video editing makes life easier for teams that work with lots of dialogue-heavy content. Instead of learning a new, complex software or hiring expensive professionals, you can edit videos using skills you already have.
Vimeo’s text-based editor helps you generate transcripts from existing video files. Using those transcripts, you can remove filler words and unwanted material, rearrange segments, revise for better quality, and extract clips.
What’s more, Vimeo goes beyond the basics by integrating this functionality with professional hosting and performance analytics. From one central dashboard, you can upload and edit content, collaborate with teams and clients, publish the results, and measure viewer engagement.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re creating content for fans, subscribers, team members, or clients. In all cases, Vimeo helps you cut down the time between hitting ‘record’ and going live, while maintaining high quality.
