negative offsets; synchronizing media in series

ELAN
1

Hello

I have a similar problem as the person who posted on this topic in 2010 (https://tla.mpi.nl/topic/is-it-possible-to-synch-media-in-series/); however, the solution Han offered at that time will not work for my particular situation.

I have video files created by my video camera which are 14 min each; they run sequentially to make videos of around 2 hours. If I join them all together in .mp4 format, while preserving quality, they are greater than 4GB. For my own purposes, I join them together and use ELAN to transcribe. I also have audio recorded by a separate audio recorder as one long 2 hour recording. I put this wav file in ELAN, synchronize the audio and the video, and everything works well.

Now, I am archiving in ELAR. The max file size is 4GB. Therefore I can’t use my system of joining all the videos together, because the resulting file is too large. I can have 9 different ELAN files for each 14 minute of video, or 1 ELAN file for the whole 2 hour wav file. Those are the only options, it seems. If ELAN would just support negative offsets, this could easily be solved, but it doesn’t. So?

2

The request for support for sequential media files is still on the wish list/to-do list, but dormant. Implementation of this (probably) involves per media framework, native (i.e. platform specific) efforts and a lot of performance and accuracy issues can be expected. Maybe the concept of playlists that most current player frameworks support could be utilized for this purpose, but it’s a big effort with uncertain outcome.

We still cannot promise that this will be implemented, let alone when. If time allows it would be interesting enough to look into this, but I don’t know when this will be (if ever).

No doubt your archiving task can’t wait for that. As an alternative to the two options you mention, you maybe could split your transcription, wave and big mp4 video into two sets of roughly one hour each?

-Han

3

Hi Han, thanks for the quick response. I appreciate the honest assessment.

I was told not to split the wav file, so I’m working something else out with the archive.

Thanks again