The key tip:
- Do not hit RETURN on the keyboard after bringing up the SEARCH box. That searches just text. You need to click on the PhraseFind button.
Web-Research:
- http://michaelkammes.com/avid/avid-phrasefind-10-tech-notes/
- (Originally by Michael Kammes, April 6, 2011. Reproduced here with slight pruning and cosmetics)
- See Avids indepth FAQ here: http://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=389887&ssdFilterCommunity15=1408&ssdFilterCommunity10=369&ssdFilter_SearchKeyWord=&Hilite=#a10
- …a few gotchas.
- Get used to NOT hitting RETURN on the keyboard after bringing up the SEARCH box. That searches just text. You need to click on the PhraseFind button.
- The database Phrasefind creates cannot currently be shared.
- Thus, every station accessing files must independently index the files. From Avid.com: In each Project folder, you will see a new folder called SearchData which contains a file called _SearchDB_. This file is the database created by Find when it indexes the bins within your project. If you have PhraseFind installed, you will also see a folder called PhoneticData which contains a number of files with a .pat extension; these files contain the phonetic information for each of the audio clips within your project. One .pat file will be created per clip.
- Linking via an AMA file or even importing does NOT cause PhaseFind to index the file.
- The Bin must be saved before PhraseFind begins .
- PhraseFind indexing also does not appear to be multithreaded.
- Routinely, one processor can be seen (barely) being taxed during indexing. The benefit of this approach is that indexing doesnt interfere with the performance of basic editing operations.
- In my tests, anything Phrasefind search returns over 60% probability seems to usually be spot on. This decreases sharply as the audio fidelity and annunciation decreases.
- I used Barack Obamas A More Prefect Union speech for accuracy testing. This offered an excellent testing opportunity, as I not only had the full speech, but also a word for word transcript of the speech to compare against. I searched for the word Dreams. The transcript from the speech told me the word dreams was used a total of 5 times. With PhraseFind, 15 hits were returned, all above 50%. The top 6 hits were ranked as 56% accurate or better. They all turned out to be correct, including a hit for the word dream (singular). Next, I tried the word education. It was spoken 6 times, and PhraseFind found all 6 instances at 85% or higher degree of certainty.
- Moving the files from one bin to another, as well as renaming the bin, causes PhraseFind to momentarily rewrite its database. Its not re-indexing the files, its simply rewriting its database.
- If a clip is deleted from the project, the associated PhraseFind entry is also deleted.Taking media offline does NOT remove the index entry for that clip, so that offline media can still be searched. (It might not be online, but you know where it is.)
- Approx 13minutes = 1MB for a PhraseFind .pat file.
- Index time is impacted by AMA linking vs native DNxHD (MXF) files. This seems to vary wildly depending on the codec associated with the AMA file.