Sometimes we’re asked if InqScribe can recognize timecodes in a media file that contains several clips spliced together — i.e., segment one starts at 00:00, segment 2 jumps ahead 30 minutes, segment 3 is on a different day, etc.

Currently, InqScribe doesn’t handle discontinuous timecodes. It starts the time count from the beginning of the actual media file and has no way of knowing when the clock time of the video shifts (since the clock time is not a real time as far as your video file’s timeline is concerned).

There’s nothing stopping you from creating timecoded transcripts of such a media file. The catch is you will not be able to “match” your transcript times that might be burned in to the video— i.e., time of day, etc.

The workaround is either constant tweaking of the start time, or creating a separate InqScribe document for each segment.

We are looking into ways to support discontinuous timecodes in for a future version, but it’s a very complicated issue. For instance, if two segments in the same video file contain the same time, InqScribe would need to know how to distinguish them.

(If you’re really interested in seeing support for discontinuous timecodes in InqScribe, please vote for that feature on our feedback page.)

Note: InqScribe does provide two ways to adjust the timecodes to match times that are already burned into your media, depending on whether you are doing the offset prior to starting your work or after the fact. But these features were designed presuming a continuous timeline from start to finish.