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Quick Start Guide to Using Reduct
Quick Start Guide to Using Reduct

Welcome to Reduct! This short guide will provide you with everything you need to get started in just a couple of minutes.

Updated over 9 months ago

If you have access, open Reduct in another tab and follow along. If you don't... grab a free trial!


If you'd prefer to watch a video instead of read, we have you covered, with a three and a half minute overview.

0 - Create or join a project

Work in Reduct is organized by project. Create a new one, or join one that somebody else has already set up in your workspace. If you just signed up for a free trial, you will begin in a new empty project.

If you're setting up a new project, select your transcription language, and set appropriate access permissions. You can adjust these settings at any time.

The sidebar

Once you are in a project, you'll see a sidebar on your left. This is where you can create new recordings, and find recordings you've previously uploaded, your highlights, your tags, videoboards, and reels. The icons along the top are tabs, which let you access the different types of things that live in Reduct. Switching tab will not impact what is currently open in the central panel.

Clicking on one of the items within a tab will generally open it in the central panel. If you have a videoboard or reel open, you can drag many items from the sidebar into it.

1 - Upload your recordings

When you click on the "New Recording" button, you will see four options for getting content into Reduct:

  1. You can upload video and audio files directly from your computer.

  2. You can connect Reduct with Zoom, to import cloud recordings without the need to juggle files or keep track of the right link.

  3. You can also import media from many third party services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, YouTube, Vimeo, usertesting.com, and more, using a web link. (More here).

  4. You can use the live capture functionality to connect to an in-progress Zoom or Google Meet call, and see a transcript while the call is ongoing. You can highlight, tag, or comment during the call, and the video is imported automatically as soon as the call is completed or the transcriber bot is removed from the call. (More here)

After you upload or import your media, Reduct will transcribe it, and syncs the transcription to your media word for word, syllable for syllable, to the millisecond. If you use live capture, these happen while the call is happening, and you'll see a live transcript continually updating as the call continues.

You can also upload multiple files in batches, or add a description or upload other files as attachments to the recording.

2 - Creating highlights

Click and drag on the transcript to select text, just like you are used to in Word or a Google Doc. As soon as you create a selection, you'll see a menu pop up in the right margin, with a series of actions you can take. To create a highlight, either click ‘Highlight’ or hit the h key on your keyboard.

Creating a highlight makes that clip easy to find again, work with, and share in the future.

You can also tag your highlights as part of your synthesis process, or simply to easily find it again later. Start typing to either use tags that already exist in your project, or to create a new one.

If you switch the left sidebar to "Tags", you can see all the tags that are already available in your project, and manage them: rename them, group them, merge them, and more.

3 - Search through your transcripts

Use the search bar at the top of the screen to search the full text of your transcripts. Our search will return exact matches for the term you put in, followed by "fuzzy matches". Reduct's NLP-based AI will find all relevant and related terms in each recording within this project.

Click on any search result to jump to that location in a recording's transcript, with the text from your search selected so that you can take action (such as highlight, tag, or add to a reel.)

Enclose your search term in quotation marks to get back only exact matches. Use the filters to widen your search to other projects, or to limit your search to specific recordings.

4 - Complex analysis and synthesis

If your project demands more nuanced analysis, synthesis, or narrative flow than you can hold in your head at one time, you can bring your highlights into a videoboard, where you can think and collaborate spatially.

Once you've created or opened a videoboard, switch the left sidebar to highlights, recordings, or tags, and drag-and-drop items onto the canvas.

5 - Crafting reels

Assemble a narrative by bringing together multiple items into a reel to rapidly communicate with the emotional heft and nuance of video.

Click ‘Reels’ at the top of the the left-hand panel; it's the one furthest to the right. If you’re creating a new reel, click 'New Reel'. If your team has already created reels in this project, you’ll find them here; click on one to open it in the central panel.

Switch the sidebar to 'Highlights,' and drag-and-drop the ones you want into your reel. You can use the filters to narrow down the list, and then drag them in one by one, or as a whole group with the "x matching" button that appears when you use the filters.

You're not limited to highlights: you can also bring an entire tag's worth of highlights into your reel by switching to that tab and dragging in a tag or tag group, or drag in entire recordings, or even other reels.

Drag-and-drop items in the reel to rearrange them into the order of your desired narrative.

6 - Editing in a reel

Striking through transcript text in a reel also edits your video. Just drag your cursor over the bits you don’t need and click ‘cut’, and the portion will be skipped during playback.

You can always change your mind - just select the portion of dialogue that was cut and click ‘Restore’.

7 - Share your work!

Click the ‘Unpublished’ indicator to publish your reel; this will let you create a link you can share via Slack, email or any other channel. In many platforms, a preview of the transcript and a thumbnail of the video will be displayed.

Viewers who click your link will see your story on a page like this.

To download your work, click the ‘Export’ icon to download the video, audio, subtitles or a transcript file with just the parts you've included in your reel. Reels can also be exported directly to Final Cut Pro, or to Adobe Premiere via our plug-in.

There's plenty more, but we hope that gives you enough to get going, and a solid foundation.

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