Having linked both audio and video files and making tiers to reflect speech and gesture I saved the transcription file. After completing 50 such transcriptions when i open them only 10 actually have anything show up when opened in ELAN. The file size is comparable to those that do work so there must be data stored in the file but for some reason ELAN is not showing the data. All the settings I can check seem to be identical between a file that works and one that doesn’t
On the file that doesn’t work there is no linked files and no tiers to look at in the Grid view. Possibly someone else would have a different version of ELAN that might show something different or there is a problem with the way it is saving / opening the files ?
From the problem description 2 possible causes come in mind:
there is a problem with the media file as a result of which the loading of the annotations is not completed
there is a problem with the structure of those annotation files
Or maybe there is another possible cause. It is difficult to say just based on the description. There might be useful information in the log file? (
You might want to send me one of the failing files so that I can try to reproduce the problem (han.sloetjes AT mpi.nl)?
Hi, I recommend to make a backup of the files before you try to repair them. It is always possible that a repair attempt actually makes things worse.
As you say that even the seemingly empty files have similar size to the working files, there is hope that only a minor problem prevents ELAN from completing the file load process, while the contents are still in the file and it can be repaired.
Maybe you could also email us a zip with one of the broken files for analysis?
Thanks for both replying. The video files are too large to email so i have zipped up an Elan file that works and one that doesn’t and have included the audio and video that are linked in with them.
I now downloaded the “doesn_t_work” rar and whatever application at my disposal I use to open the eaf, the result is always an empty document, at best. Opening the file in a text editor in binary mode shows a long listing of zero’s. So, I think the data is just lost, despite the size of the file (or something went wrong when creating the rar?).
