Troubleshooting ELAN
Tips and tricks for troubleshooting ELAN
Problem: ELAN is slow and crashes a lot Cause: Buggy newer ELAN versions cause the delays Solution: There are two ways to fix this:
Uninstall current version of ELAN and install version 6.2 or 6.3 from this page. Older versions of ELAN might have weird glitches or bugs that have been fixed in later versions, however.
To use the newest version of ELAN, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Edit Preferences -> User Interface -> Painting strategy for custom timeline -based viewers and components and select Paint to buffer first, then to screen option instead of Paint directly to the screen. This will fix the lagging in Annotations Mode. This will, however, cause only one tier to show annotations in Segmentation Mode. As such, you'll need to switch back to Paint directly to the screen for Segmentation Mode, which doesn't typically lag, so it will be fine.
Problem: Video streaming is laggy Cause: VPN & new versions of ELAN Solution: let lab staff know that you are TEMPORARILY copying a video to your desktop, and copy the .eaf file to the desktop as well. Go to Edit > Linked files.. and point ELAN to the new copy of the video on your desktop. If this doesn't fix it, try playing video from Quicktime and aligning annotations with timestamps manually. Delete the local copy of the video as soon as you are done.
Problem: Exported tsv/csv has duplicate annotations Cause: When you export an ELAN file to tab-delimited text and you select for separate column for each tier, the default option "Repeat values of annotations spanning other annotations" will cause certain overlapping annotations to have their own row, which means each annotations might appear more than once. Solution: Select "Only repeat within annotation hierarchies" to ensure that this doesn't happen (we will still need to select the above options to ensure that dependent tiers like mwu@CHI is included with CHI)
Problem: Add controlled vocabularies page in ELAN is blank Cause: ELAN doesn't play well with low display resolutions Solution: Change your display resolution to the maximum possible (1920 x 1080) by going into Display Settings -> Display resolution
Problem: Annotation window de-synched from the soundwave Cause: No idea Solution: Right-click on the annotation window and check that Connected to Other Viewers with a Time Scale checkbox is ticked
Problem: Waveform appears delayed compared to the video sound track, if you set up the video and the audio track following this Gitbook page. Cause: If the .wav file is extracted from the video using Audacity + ffmpeg, ffmpeg introduces a small delay to the audio file. Solution: Consider extracting the sound track using iMovie (for Mac users). Add the video to library --> Drag video to timeline --> Click on the Share icon (top right corner for iMovie 10) --> Set "Audio Only" for the Format, and "WAV" for File Format.
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