ELAN

Introduction     Quickstart     Manual     Download software
This document provides a bit of help with opening and using ELAN annotation files, and uses screenshots from ELAN 2.3 with the language set to English. For further help, see the manual or the very helpful getting-started guide for sign language users If you have questions about or problems with operating ELAN, you can send a message to the ELAN mailing list (elan@mpi.nl); you can become a member of the list by following the instructions at the ELAN web site or by sending a subscription message by email. The features discussed below are far from complete, and are only meant as a first guide.

Opening an ELAN document

After starting ELAN, select Open... from the File menu. Navigate to the location of the ELAN file you want to display. The dialog window will only show .eaf files, and not the necessary movie or preferences files. When opening an .eaf file, the media files that are specified in the .eaf file will automatically be opened if they are in the same folder/directory.

If ELAN can not find one or more of the media files, the following warning will appear:

You can then either locate the movie file (with the file name exactly as specified) on your computer, or click 'cancel'. In the latter case, ELAN will ask you if you want to continue:

If you select 'no', you can open another document; if you select 'yes', ELAN will open with only the movies that were found, or no movie at all. The latter will still allow you to inspect view the transcriptions and search in them, but you will not see the video move along as you browse the document.

The display of annotions in an ELAN document

When you open an existing ECHO document, you will see something like this:


The ELAN window. From top to bottom: menu bar, video viewer, media and selection controls, and the timeline viewer. On the top-right, you find three other viewers that present that annotations in a different way: grid viewer, text viewer, and the subtitle viewer.

The timeline viewer (the bottom half of the screen) most clearly presents the concept of ELAN annotations: you see a set of tiers (marked by the coloured labels on the left), and a time axis from left to right. Annotations with values appropriate for each tier are marked by horizontal lines; the vertical lines at the beginning and end of every annotation mark the precise begin and end time of each annotation. If you click anywhere in the timeline viewer, the video window(s) will automatically jump to the correct time. This position in time is indicated in the timeline viewer by means of the vertical red line.

When you first start exploring an annotated document, it is a good idea to select a tier in the grid viewer or the text viewer. When you then start playback of the document, you will quickly get a grasp of some of the core functionality of ELAN. To do this, select a tier from the pull-down menu in either the grid or text viewer:

The grid viewer lists all the annotations on a tier in a list, adding the begin and end times, as well as the duration.

The text viewer presents all the annotations on a tier as running text, separated by spaces.

Navigating through the document

Just as in the timeline viewer, in both grid and text viewers you can click on any annotation to move the video to the beginning of that annotation. Clicking on an annotation causes this annotation to be selected: its duration is then marked in all viewers by a light blue background. The precise location in time is indicated in all viewers in red colour. When you start playing the video, the selected annotation will stay the same, but the current time constantly changes, marked by the change of the markers in red. Selecting annotations is necessary to change their values, for example, in addition to navigating through a document.

To play the video, either use your mouse to click on the playback button in the set of media controls, or use the corresponding keyboard shortcut (control-space).

These buttons have the following functions and keyboard equivalents:

Go to begin of media Command-B (Mac) / Control-B (Windows)
Go to previous scrollview Command-page up / Control-page up. A Scrollview is the amount of time that is displayed in the timeline viewer. By jumping back and forward one scrollview at a time, you can quickly jump through the whole document. You can adjust how much information is presented in the timeline viewer by right-clicking somewhere in the timeline viewer, and selecting a different 'zoom factor' than the default 100%.
Set time one second back Shift-left
Go to previous frame Command-left arrow / Control-left arrow. A video frame in the European PAL format is 1/25th of a second. By moving frame-by-frame, you can very slowly move through the video and annotations.
Go to previous pixel Command-Shift-left arrow
Play/pause the media Shift-space bar
Go to next pixel Command-Shift-right arrow
Go to next frame Command-right arrow / Control-right arrow
Set time one second ahead Shift-right
Go to next scroll view Command-page down / Control-page down
Go to end of media Command-E / Control-E

Search options

ELAN allows you to search annotations within a document using complex queries; select Find... from the Search menu, or use the keyboard equivalent command-F (Mac) or control-F (Windows). The list of search results can be used to jump to the corresponding time in the annotation document, by clicking on the annotation.


The 'Search Dialog' window. Here you can select a tier and a search criterion, and add further tier(s) you want to search on (add new constraint). When you type the search item(s) and click the search button the number of annotations, the full content of each annotation and the beginning and end time of each annotation where the search item was found, is displayed.

It is also possible to perform queries across multiple EAF files; in this case it is not possible to specify on which tier you would like to search (since not every document will contain the same set of tiers). You do have to specify in which files you would like to search; the following dialogue box will open when you select 'Search multiple EAF' from the 'Search' menu:

If you click 'Define search domain', you will see the following window:

Make sure that you list the files and/or folders in which you would like to search on the right-hand side, by first finding them in the left-hand area and then clicking the arrow button in the middle. The programme will then search in all ELAN annotation files in the folders and subfolders in the list on the right. In the search results window that you see below, the second column lists the file in which the target was found, while the third column specifies the tier in that file. The annotations preceding and following the target on the same tier are also listed in the results.