Annotation mode slowing for video data

Hello,
I’m using ELAN 6.9 on a windows PC. I have sign language data so I have 3 high quality videos synced together for each file. I have been annotating these files for a long time, but I’m now having an issue with the remaining files not working in annotation mode. When I go to select a segment, it lags. The red line doesn’t move with my mouse and the player also doesn’t play. It eventually moves, but it skips all the frames in between where it got stuck and where my mouse stopped. This makes it impossible to work on sign language data because I miss so many frames that I have no idea what has been signed. Some of the files are also playing in slow motion and the players are generally slow to respond (taking 20-30 seconds to start playing after the play button is clicked for both playing a segment and playing the whole video.) The three videos don’t often play together either which is a problem because sometimes I need to see a different angle to understand what was signed.

I have transcribed most of my videos in ELAN already (35/44) and this was only a problem with a few. I’m not sure how the others resolved themselves, but after a few weeks of hair pulling, I logged on one day and everything was behaving nicely. I have tried moving the files from a box drive to my harddrive so that internet was no longer a factor. This is still happening with files that are stored together in one folder on my harddrive. I would appreciate some troubleshooting ideas.

Hi Tamara,

The files which are causing issues have the same format as the previously used videos ?
Was there any different media framework selected in Preferences of ELAN for these videos ? If not then, as you have stored the files on your hard drive and still face the problem, one of the reason could be high quality videos. High quality videos can be demanding on the system especially if the codec is not optimised.
We advise to look into the video encoding of these files.
Try re-encoding your videos to a form as suggested here to a ELAN-friendly format.
media encoding guidelines.

Thank you Thank you Thank you! I re-rendered the videos with a different codec and they work beautifully! You’ve saved my dissertation!

Glad to know it worked Tamara.