'Discounting' certain sections from overall file length

ELAN
1

Hi there,

I’d just like to get some advice on the following ELAN scenario; imagine that you would like to code the first 10 minutes only of a bunch of video files, but each video has differing amounts of time that the participants are not on screen (they are therefore offshot, the data is uncodeable and this should not count towards their 10 minutes). This can happen at any time during the video and when it’s happened, I’ve coded it as “participant unavailable” on a dedicated tier

However, I’m now struggling to work out how to remove these from the overall file length so I get 10 minutes exactly for each participant, I stupidly assumed you could cut sections of the video.

My apologies if there is a blindingly obvious answer to this, it has been a long day and many sincere thanks in advance!

2

I don’t think there is an obvious solution to this problem.
ELAN doesn’t provide the functionality of cutting or removing parts of a video. It is possible to clip parts of a video (by means of other tools e.g. ffmpeg) and to do so batch wise, but if I understand you correctly, you want to remove certain parts of the video and have the rest “glued” together (at least so much of it that you have 10 minutes of each participants)? There is no such functionality, I’m afraid.

-Han