I figured I'd leave a question here while I did the manual labor, but what do you find is the best way to transcribe footage?

I'm an editor and the first thing I like to do is create a script of people said, then piece together parts of their takes, and THEN get to the actual footage editing. That way I'm only working with what I need ahead of time.

Basically what I do now is load up the videos in VLC, and open a TextEdit (mac), then watch it through normally or double speed until I get to a part with the interview, then I mark that timecode on the TextEdit, and go watch through the interview in triple-quadruple slowdown, so that I can keep up with what they say and not have to constantly stop and start it back up.

With this way it seems like I'm doing somewhere around 5 minutes real time to transcribe a minute, which comes to about 12 video mins a realtime hour. And I was just wondering if there was a better way you guys already know about. I'm not sure I trust auto-transcribe-type things.

Do you think this slowing the vid down and having to go back 5 seconds only a few times when I can't quite tell what he's saying because it's so slow, is saving more time than watching it in real time, pausing, writing, going back and watching the next part?

Or do you know better ways? Seems transcribing is the most time-consuming part of my workflow.

Since VLC is opensource, would it be possible to combine VLC and a Text Editor...something like VLC on the top and the text editor on the bottom, and whenever you hit a certain key, it automatically puts the timecode in the text, and you can use VLC's shortcuts while typing? Etc?

Again, non-automatic preferred. For one, it could be wrong, and two, I'd like to get used to the footage.

Thanks