Ok, this is a really short tip, but since I spent a good amount of head scratching on it, I figured I might as well share the experience.

So, right after watching a tutorial about the cool feature that Adobe Premiere CS5 has of searching through your video files, and, more or less successfully, transcribing what people are saying, I decided to try it out.

So, I grabbed some footage from my HVX200, and, since the tutorial I saw was for CS4, struggled to find the same buttons under CS5. In CS4 there are 3 buttons, but in CS5 there is only 1… there are also a couple more options once you get the Speech Analysis dialog going.

At any rate, this isn’t a tutorial on how to use it, just how I worked around this issue:

No matter what clip I selected, the Analysis button was always disabled!

After a bunch of head scratching and realizing that the XMP panel said the file couldn’t be changed, I went to Windows Explorer and right-clicked on the file and picked Properties… sure enough, the files were marked Read-Only.

I selected all the files in the folder, and unchecked the Read-Only flag, and lo and behold, the Analysis button became enabled.

I don’t know why that matters, ‘cos I thought analyzing the file for speech would require no changes to be made, and that the sidecar (xmp) files are separate from the actual video files, but… I don’t really know how this feature works under the hood! If you do, I’d love to find out 🙂

At any rate, if your Speech Analysis button is disabled (grayed-out), make sure your files aren’t read-only!

Good luck,

Val Gameiro