Transforming Subjective Content

While iPOV can apply powerful visual transformations to client video clips, it really excels at a series of transformations that are more subjective and content-oriented. iPOV has defined and formalized the transformations in this category - and it has developed formal production processes to support each one.

The essential insight behind these transformations is the fact that video is a powerful and very comprehensive knowledge capture medium. If an expert can explain something complicated to you in person, there is a good chance that a comprehensive video recording of that interchange will contain most or a lot of the information that someone else in your situation would also like to know. As simple as the idea seems, it has always been surprisingly hard to make it work in practice. In iPOV's experience with more than 350 projects, that usually comes down to three factors:

• The subject experts are often very camera-shy
• Their knowledge tends to emerge haphazardly
• No one wants to watch hours of video to piece together the expert's knowledge

In the past, these problems have been more than sufficient to deter use of video in most knowledge capture situations. It was only recently that iPOV discovered that there are systematic transformations that can be applied to the subjective content to make those problems go away. So far, iPOV has identified three of these transformations and has developed formal, systematic procedures to pu them into action. The three basic subjective content transformations are described in the following table.

Transformation	iPOV Technology	iPOV Service	Goals
Restatement	Replace the audio track and associated subtitles	Transcribe audio to text script Clean up the grammar Allow expert to revise script Record voiceover from validated script Reassemble finished video/audio/text	Totally control the spoken message that accompanies the video
Translation & Localization	Replace the audio track and associated subtitles	Transcribe audio to text script, or translate existing script to target language Clean up the grammar Allow expert to revise script Record voiceover from validated script Reassemble finished video/audio/text	Generate accurate translation of audio and text commentary
Extraction	Use knowledge and still images from movie to produce other types of documents	Extract images from movie Transcribe spoken commentary from movie Use other authoring tools to assemble salvaged assets into new documents and media	Salvage valuable knowledge from otherwise unusable source video

Although these transformations sound simple (and they are), it's a huge management challenge to maintain quality on large projects. With dozens ,if not hundreds, of bits and pieces of image and text floating around, It is incredibly easy to get them mixed up or to put a commentary on the wrong image or movie. iPOV has developed a suite of specialized software tools to support these transformations in its service operations and we have developed a set of formal procedures and management methods to ensure that information is not lost in the process.

As a result, iPOV can apply these transformations quickly, economically and under tight quality control. We make mistakes, but nowhere near what an eLearning author would make if they had to implement any of these processes on their own. Moreover, we don't rely solely on our conscientious employee. We have developed detailed software and procedural tools and systems to minimize human error throughout the process.