A Minor Opus of Content Creation Tricks

This is intended to be a simple repository of content creation tricks and this entry #1:

Facebook Reel-to-Text Conversion:

Ripping audio from Facebook reels and Tiktoks. With the advent of ML it is sometimes nice to be able to analyze the text from Facebook reels using Large Language Models (LLMs). 

Summary:

• The audio channel in reels carries less information than you might expect due to the fact that much of the information is conveyed in the visual part of the reel.
• Nonetheless, it is occasionally useful to summarize the information in the reel.
• Flixier can be used, but there is an extra step since it cannot rip videos directly from Facebook, as it doesn't have login permission to Facebook.
• First, you have to download the Facebook reel video to your machine,
• Then you can upload it to Fixier and use Subtitles to rip the video.

To get the reel to your machine use Snapsave: https://snapsave.app/facebook-reels-download

Paste the URL in Snapsave, and it will pull the reel for downloading.
Prune the URL first as it contains a suffix with massive unneeded URL intel.
Usually everything after the reel ID and the ? can be deleted:

The URL should look like this:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1441145050009587

The processing takes a minute or so for a typical reel.

Complete the download by using the 720p (HD) entry. Ignore the Render column, the audio and video are pristine.

Then upload the reel to Flixier: https://editor.flixier.com/, you have to have an account to rip more than 10 minutes of audio. This is done by clicking the import button on the left side.

Then choose 'My Device' and navigate to the image location. I just work from the Desktop to save time.

Now the file will appear in the Flixier Librarry, but you have to drag it down to the editing bar before it will let you rip the audio.

Now with the video selected you click on subtitles.

Then click on 'auto-subtitles':

Then Flixier will go off and start converting the audio to text. This takes a few minutes so I usually play a quick game of chess, so my workflow stays intact in my head.

If you are doing further text processing be sure to choose the option to NOT include timestamps, otherwise, the text will be cluttered with them:

Then click the download icon to the right and you're good to go. You've ripped the text from the audio from the Facebook reel.