Chapter 4. ELAN documents

Table of Contents

Basic Information: Media Files and Annotation Files
How to manage documents
Creating a new document
Set the author of a document
Synchronizing video files
Opening an existing document
Re-open recently accessed files
Switching between multiple files
Saving a document
Saving a selection as .eaf file
Merging transcriptions
Saving a template
Changing the links to media files
Creating automatic backups
Printing
Configuring the page settings (page setup)
Previewing the printed pages
Importing Transcriber files
Importing a CHAT file
Importing a document from Shoebox
Importing a document from Toolbox
Importing a document from Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx)
Importing CSV / Tab-delimited Text Files
Importing a Praat TextGrid file
Exporting a document to Shoebox
Exporting a document to Toolbox (UTF-8)
Exporting a document as a tab-delimited text file
Exporting Tiger XML
Exporting CHAT files
Exporting traditional transcript files
Exporting a Praat TextGrid file
Exporting an alphabetical list of words
Exporting a part of a clip
Exporting a SMIL clip
Exporting to QuickTime Text
Exporting to Subtitle Text
Exporting ELAN’s document view
Exporting to interlinear text
Exporting to HTML
Exporting to a Filmstrip Image
Exporting Multiple Files
Exporting tiers from multiple files
Opening a wave file in Praat
Exporting a selection to a wave file with Praat
Closing a file
Exiting ELAN
Screen display and navigation through a document
Basic Information: The ELAN window
The Video Viewer
The Annotation Density Viewer
The Waveform Viewer
The Subtitle Viewer
The Grid Viewer
The Text Viewer
The Metadata Viewer
The Timeline Viewer and the Interlinear Viewer
The Timeseries Viewer
The Menu options
The Media Player options
The color coding
Increasing/decreasing the size of the ELAN window
Switching Viewers on/off
Increasing/decreasing the size of Viewers
Switching tiers on/off
Rearranging the order of tiers
Sorting tiers
Changing the time zoom
Changing the vertical (intensity) zoom
Changing the font size
Font Browser
Editing preferences
Importing and exporting preferences
Editing shortcuts
How to navigate through a document
Accessing points in time
Going to the borders of a selection
Jumping step by step through a document
Viewing a list of annotations within one tier (Grid Viewer)
Jumping from annotation to annotation (Interlinear Viewer)
How to play a document
Playing a document
Playing a selection
Playing around a selection
Playing in slow motion
Changing playback rate and volume via the keyboard

Basic Information: Media Files and Annotation Files

Every ELAN project consists of at least two files: one (or more) media file(s), and one annotation file.

  1. One (or more) media file(s):

    • 0 or more video file(s) (*.mpg, *.mov etc.)

    • and/or one audio file (*.wav)

The video file allows you to view the video and listen to the sound. If you want to view the waveform as well, you need to create an additional *.wav file through a conversion program that converts the audio data from one *.mp(e)g file into a *.wav format. In the case of multiple video files, the audio of the first selected video file is played. The kind and number of supported video formats depend upon the media framework you are using. If your media framework supports a format, the same goes for ELAN.

The following media frameworks are known to work:

  • Windows (in order of preference, DirectX being the best solution):

    • DirectX/DirectShow (Windows Media Player)

    • QuickTime

    • JMF (Java Media Framework)

  • MacOS (in order of preference):

    • QuickTime using the Cocoa Framework (QTKit)

    • QuickTime using QuickTime for Java

  • Linux: JMF

Note

  • For *.mov files (i.e., Cinepak-Quicktime-Movies) it is important that these are self-contained files, i.e., the video information needs to be contained within the *.mov file itself. If this is not the case, ELAN will not be able to display the file.

  • Unlike other media files, the playback rate of Windows Media Audio (WMA) files cannot be altered.

  1. One annotation file:

    • an annotation file created by ELAN (*.eaf, “EUDICO Annotation Format”)

    • or an imported annotation file. The following formats can be imported:Shoebox/Toolbox files (with the extension *.txt)

    • CHAT files (*.cha)

    • Transcriber files (*.trs)

All information (e.g., the tier setup, the time alignment, the annotations) is saved to the annotation file only – never to the media file(s).

Note

Take care when editing a media file. Afterwards you probably will want to resynchronize its alignment with the corresponding the annotations, as described in the section called “Synchronizing video files”.

Although it's not compulsory it is a good practice to use a common name for media files and the annotation file. So, it is recommended to use a.eaf next to a.mpg and a.wav.

Imported Shoebox files (*.txt) also do not need to have the same name as their media files, and they can be located in different directories. All imported files can alternatively be saved as ELAN files (*.eaf).

All annotation files (*.eaf) can be exported as text, Shoebox/Toolbox and CHAT files.