I’ll try my best to describe my problem as concisely as possible but feel free to ask details if needed.
ELAN crashed as I was trying to delete a tier. I believe this might be due to that tier having many annotations (I had created regular annotations of the size of video frames at 30fps on about 3h total time). Alone creating that tier took very long. This turned out to not lead to the expected result and I then decided to delete the tier. This is when ELAN crashed and I stopped the program (after having waited a few hours hoping that it would terminate the job).
I am now unable to open the .eaf file (it makes ELAN freeze again) and I was wondering whether I could repair the file in a text editor. I can open the .eaf file in BBEdit and see that the annotations are still there (even those I tried to delete). However, I am unsure how to modify the text file as I do not want to mess around with the important annotations or important information in the header. I would like to continue working on this file inside ELAN.
The file is fairly heavy (about 129 MB) so it is unlikely I can send it over email and I would prefer to avoid a third party file transfer. So I was wondering if there is a tutorial on how to repair .eaf files. Or if there is an easy way to delete the unwanted tier using the text editor.
There is no manual or tutorial on how to repair an .eaf file, I’m afraid.
I don’t know BBEdit well enough, but I don’t suppose it support XML validation? The best thing to do is to open (a copy of) the file in an XML editor that can highlight the errors. Sometimes it’s only a single annotation with an empty time slot reference or other empty attribute that is the problem. Even then it can be tricky since there are a lot of references between elements in an eaf file, removing e.g. an annotation can lead to other errors.
So, maybe you can try to edit the file in an XML editor (with syntax and error highlighting)?
Thank you, Han, for your response.
I ran the file in an XML editor as you suggested and there does not seem to be errors on validation, aside from a schema validation error reading “Failed to parse the XML resource http:{www}{dot}mpi{dot}nl/tools/elan/EAFv3.0.xsd” (the curly brackets in the link are mine, since I’m not allowed to post a link in the forum). Is this something I should be concerned about? This message does not appear on a previous version of the file (one that I can open with Elan).
One thing I noticed is that the problematic file seems to be giving a hard time to any program I fed it into… It is a lot larger in size and I was wondering if it is not just a problem of file size. Is there any limit on the number of annotations that Elan can handle?
Hi,
There is no built-in limit to the number of annotations ELAN can handle, but there is a limit determined by available memory and computing power.
You mentioned ELAN freezes when you try to open the file; I assumed this means there is something wrong and some error occurred. There might be information in the log file (I assume menu View->View Log… is not accessible if the application is really frozen), it can be found in ELAN"s data folder, is named elan0.log (or elan1.log etc.) and can be opened in a text editor after (force) quitting ELAN.
But maybe opening the file just takes a very long time; you could try switching XML validation in ELAN off and then open the file again. Disabling validation can be done by opening the file elan.properties (located in the app sub-folder of the ELAN install folder) in a text editor changes the property ELAN.EAF.Validate=true
to false, save the file and launch ELAN and try again (it is normally not advised to do this).
Does your XML editor still show the contents of the damaged/big file? The error message seems to indicate something else is wrong (maybe too many errors?), it probably has nothing to do with the .xsd being parsed or not (since you don’t see that with other files).
I believe I should be able to create a Crypteshare space for secure file sharing, as an alternative to third party file transfer services, in case you want me to have a look at the file.
Hi !
Good to hear there is no built-in limit for annotations in ELAN. Yes, I could see all the content of the file in the text / xml editors: the head, the latest annotations on all tiers, and control vocabulary section. Comparing with the structure of other ELAN files, everything “looked” normal (but as you said it could be a space character lost somewhere that I did not see…).
Anyway, I kind of lost patience working with this huge file (I guess I reached the limit of computing power of my machine…). I reverted to the most recent back-up and manually reworked all the annotations I had lost. It took some time but the situation is resolved now.
I will keep your advice for future troubleshooting. Thanks very much. I really appreciate the time you spent helping me.
