Is it possible to synch media in series?
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Is it possible to synch media in series?
I recorded two sides of a conversation using two cameras to create two video files. However, because of a glitch involving one of my cameras, one side of the conversation (Side "B") is in two pieces with a 5-minute gap between each half (corresponding to irretrievably lost data). So my resulting files look like this:
Side A: One hour-long uninterrupted video.
Side B: Two 27-minute long video files that can't be simply spliced together and still synch up with Side A.
I know how to synchronize Side A with the first half of Side B, but I don't know how to then synch up the second half of B so that it lines up with the second half of A and doesn't mess-up the first half of B. I've tried to do it using "media synchronization" mode and was unsuccessful--I could do one or the other, but not both, and when synching the second half of B, Elan truncated (virtually) the first half of Side A.
Is it possible to do what I want, or do I need to give up and cut Side A in half and create two .eaf files? That would not be my preferred solution. I am perfectly happy to go in and manually edit the .eaf file using Wordpad if there's a way to do it by brute force. So if there's a special bit of markup that would make it work, please tell me.
Thanks,
TG
Re: Is it possible to synch media in series?
No, this is currently not possible. I think it would require a negative "time origin" for the second part of side B. Something like "start playing at -27 minutes (or -32 minutes)). When the option to synchronize media was introduced, it was implemented such that it is possible to start a media file with a positive offset only: "treat the point at e.g. 5 sec and 400 ms as if it is the beginning of the file, 0.00 sec.".
We might consider supporting negative offsets, such that the player shows a black rectangle or the first video frame as long as the media playhead is within this "negative time offset".
You can't wait for that. I think the best thing to do would be to merge the two halves of side B in a video editing application and insert a portion of 5 minutes of gray or black, marking the timespan that is missing.
-Han
Re: Re: Is it possible to synch media in series?
Thank you. I will do as you suggest and try adding in a gray block of 5 minutes.
FWIW, My initial reluctance to do that had to do with figuring out the precise amount of time needed to be spliced in to get everything to still align correctly (it's "about" 5 minutes--it will take a bit of figuring to determine exactly how much, and my video editing program is not top rate). So I still hope that you will include support for negative offsets in some (near?) future version of Elan--I can imagine something like this happening again to me or others :)
Release of ELAN 4.3.0
