Really basic question about entering annotations
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Really basic question about entering annotations
I went thru and marked all the eye-blinks that show on my film, and now I want to go back and expand that annotation to include all eye movements - up, down, right, left, straight-ahead, etc.
Here is where I ran into trouble with basic concepts. I recorded the blinks as independent with no parent.
The record of all eye positions should (I think) be a time-subdivision tier. My reasoning for this choice is that the subject's eyes have to be doing something all the time, and all of the annotations should adjoin - i.e. no empty gaps.
But a time-subdivision tier must be subordinate to something. I just created a single annotation on the default tier the length of the entire clip. That seemed to work OK.
But now I've run into problems. What I really want to do is copy the blink intervals into my eye-position tier and have the spaces between the blinks default to (anything). Then I could subdivide them based on what was actually happening. But I can't copy a "none" tier onto an "time-subdivision" tier. *** Is there a way to do this????
Then I started trying to do it 'manually'. There are tools for automatically subdividing a time-subdivision tier subordinate to some text, but I haven't found anything to do it for non-textual parents.
***Is there a way to do this???
Also, if I have to do it manually, how do I ensure that I preserve the exact same timing for the already-annotated blinks? (there are hundreds of them, so I don't want to have to re-do that work).
**or - is there a way to document the rest of the eye activity on the original tier and ensure that there are no gaps?
I'm sure that many of my answers are documented - I just haven't been able to figure out where to look.
Any help will be appreciated.
Bruce
Re: Really basic question about entering annotations
I'm not sure if these questions are really that basic, but anyway here are some attempts to answer them. Per main question:
1)*** It should be possible to create a copy of a "None" tier as a Time-Subdivision of another tier. If you have your "blinks" tier, another tier with a single annotation spanning the whole video and at least one Linguistic Type with Stereotype "Time Subdivision", you can select Tier->Copy Tier, first select the blink tier, in the next step select the tier with the single annotation and in the final step select a time subdivision linguistic type. As a result a copy of the tier will be made as a child of the single annotation tier. The annotations will span the whole parent annotation interval and as a result you will lose mostly the end times of the blinks.
2)*** No there is no facility to automatically create subdivisions other than based on the tokens of the parent annotation
3)** No there is currently no functionality like "fill gaps with new annotations". Would be good to have though; it is on the (long) to do list.
In your case, I'm not sure if the best way to go is to start with creating the subdivision tier. If you already have many "blink" annotations, you would have to do a lot of work again.
You could (maybe on a pure "None" copy of the "blink" tier) add the eye movement annotations in between the blink annotations. If you place them just a few milliseconds over the existing annotations, you can be sure that there are no gaps. Or you can leave little gaps of a few ms and at the very end of the process create a copy of the tier as a time subdivision tier of a "single annotation spanning the complete media duration" tier (as described above). The little gaps will then be "erased".
I hope this helps.
-Han
Re: Really basic question about entering annotations
Thanks - your instructions helped. It turns out that my problem arose during the copy step - there was only one type displayed for choosing, and I hadn't been selecting it. Once I actually clicked on it, everything worked fine.
I'm not sure if these questions are really that basic, but anyway here are some attempts to answer them. Per main question: 1)*** It should be possible to create a copy of a "None" tier as a Time-Subdivision of another tier. If you have your "blinks" tier, another tier with a single annotation spanning the whole video and at least one Linguistic Type with Stereotype "Time Subdivision", you can select Tier->Copy Tier, first select the blink tier, in the next step select the tier with the single annotation and in the final step select a time subdivision linguistic type. As a result a copy of the tier will be made as a child of the single annotation tier. The annotations will span the whole parent annotation interval and as a result you will lose mostly the end times of the blinks. <snip> I hope this helps. -Han
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