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Is there any note-taking software/app for video?

14 points by jocelyuki ↗ HN
I usually learn things and get inspired by watching videos from YouTube, Tiktok, or online courses (I admit that video is good for learning, but not good for extracting information and reviewing). And I found it's very complicated to take notes for videos. For now, I have to install a screenshot app to take screenshots, transfer transcripts with an online tool (and it doesn't work most of the time), and open a note-taking app to put them all in, then write down my own thoughts.

I want to know if you guys have the same pain as I do, and is there any tool that can combine video, audio, transcripts, and text together for better note-taking?

5 comments

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voltaireodactyl
You should look at platforms designed with editorial workflows in mind — most offer some way to write time stamped notes/ graphics and such (along with a way to export them), and synchronize their appearance to the video while remaining fully searchable.

Frankie (by cospective) is excellent in this space, although even Vimeo provides some ability to do this at this point.

lstamour
There are a couple Chrome extensions designed for taking notes on videos, but I haven’t tried them. These days I use tools like Descript to transcribe videos (or insert transcriptions from the video, which is a bit complicated to do) and then have a video I can treat kind of like a doc - leave comments, make a new composition of just the highlights, leave markers. It doesn’t quite tag the way Dovetail app can, though. Storyboard mode in Descript is kind of neat, you can leave slashes to remind yourself when slides change, etc.

This really is an area that needs more innovation, long term.

Oh, I also sometimes embed videos using iframes into Miro boards and then use that for note taking. But it’s a little tricky when you want to attach notes to particular timestamps in the video. I think maybe you can embed Descript shares as iframes into Miro but I haven’t tried it yet.

ud0
I am building something similar. If you can please give a detailed description of what your dream tool would work like.
Leftium
I forked otranscribe to help with this: https://otranscribe.netlify.app/

Source code: https://github.com/Leftium/oTranscribe

A lot of online courses didn't offer transcripts, so I'd get autogenerated transcripts from YouTube, then convert them to a format that otranscribe could read.

Transcript Converter: https://github.com/Leftium/otrgen

This doesn't solve all your problems, but this lets you easily search the transcript, jump to that part, and add notes.

(You can drag and drop OTR files into the text area)