How to navigate through a document

ELAN supports the following options for navigating through a document:

All Viewers are synchronized in time, i.e., when you navigate to a specific point or selection in one Viewer, all other Viewers will immediately jump to the corresponding point or selection:

Accessing points in time

To access a point in time, do one of the following:

  1. Use the time code box.
    1. Click on the time code above the media playback controls (left side of the ELAN window). The Goto dialog window appears.

      Figure 1.112. Click the timecode box

      Click the timecode box


    2. Enter the time code in the following format: “hh:mm:ss.sss” (hours:minutes:seconds.milliseconds). The crosshair jumps immediately to the selected time code.

      You can omit part of the time code information:

      • If the digits are “00”, you can omit “hours:”, “hours:minutes:”, or “hours:minutes:seconds.”
      • It is optional to specify “.milliseconds”.

      Note

      The character preceding the milliseconds is a dot, not a colon.

  2. Use the crosshair

    Figure 1.113. Use the crosshair

    Use the crosshair


    Click somewhere in the Text, Subtitle, Timeline, Waveform or Grid Viewer. The crosshair will jump to that point. By holding the ALT button and dragging the time axis to the left or to the right you can scroll through the annotations.

  3. Use the media control buttons

    See The Media Player options

  4. Use the 'Shift' + Scrollwheel function. When pressing and holding 'Shift', you can scroll horizontally with the scrollwheel on your mouse. On a laptop or macbook, you can use two finger scrolling to achieve the same effect.

Going to the borders of a selection

If you have made a selection (see How to make a selection), you can move the crosshair to the begin or end of that selection from anywhere within the file.

To jump to the begin, click on the button, which is part of the Selection Controls. Then the button will show an arrow in the other direction , which brings the crosshair to the end of the selection.

Jumping step by step through a document

It is possible to move the crosshair back and forth step by step. To achieve this, use one of the media controls as described in The Media Player options.

If the media framework ELAN is using cannot determine the video format, you can alter the step size when using the next/previous frame control. This is useful in order to work with a “natural” frame duration, depending on the video format that is used (i.e. 25 frames/second for PAL or +/- 30 frames/second for NTSC).

Do the following:

  1. Click on Options menu.
  2. Go to Set Frame Length. The following menu appears:

    Figure 1.114. Set Frame Length menu

    Set Frame Length menu


    Select an option from the menu:

    • PAL: The 1 frame step size for video data corresponds to one PAL frame (40 ms)
    • NTSC: The 1 frame step size for video data corresponds to one NTSC frame (33 ms)
  3. Click on a Frame Length mode to select it. A radio bullet appears next to the selected step mode.

Viewing a list of annotations within one tier (Grid Viewer)

ELAN allows you to list all annotations from a single tier, and then select one annotation and jump to it.

To activate the Grid Viewer, click on the Grid tab:

Figure 1.115. The grid viewer

The grid viewer


The structure of the Grid View window is as follows:

Figure 1.116. Structure of the grid viewer

Structure of the grid viewer


You can change the Grid Viewers interface at any moment by right clicking in the Grid Viewer. A context menu will appear:

Figure 1.117. Grid viewer with context menu

Grid viewer with context menu


In this context menu, you can choose between the following options:

  • choose the columns displayed in the Grid Viewer
  • changing the Grid Viewers font size
  • toggle between the time code format (hh:mm:ss.mmm) and milliseconds

You can use the Grid Viewer window to navigate to an annotation in the ELAN window. You have the following two options:

  1. Move the crosshair to the begin of an annotation.

    Do the following:

    1. In the Grid Viewer window, click with the mouse button on an annotation.

      A red triangle appears next to the annotation in the Grid Viewer window, and the crosshair moves to the beginning of that annotation in the ELAN window.

  2. Select a time interval.

    Do the following:

    1. In the Grid Viewer window, click with the mouse button on the first annotation that you want to select.
    2. Keep the mouse button down and drag the mouse to another annotation.

      In the Grid Viewer window, all selected annotations are highlighted in light blue color. In all other windows, the corresponding time interval is selected and highlighted in light blue color (starting with the beginning of the first annotation and ending with the endpoint of the last).

Note

Selecting a time interval also changes the current time. This happens implicitly by moving the crosshair to the begin of the annotation.

Figure 1.118. Grid viewer with selected annotations

Grid viewer with selected annotations


Jumping from annotation to annotation (Interlinear Viewer)

In the Interlinear Viewer, you can jump from one annotation block forward/backward to the next block. Do one of the following:

  1. Click on the left arrow button at the top of the Interlinear Viewer to move to the previous annotation block.
  2. Click on the right arrow button at the top of the Interlinear Viewer to move to the next annotation block.

Figure 1.119. Interlinear viewer

Interlinear viewer