FAQ

Is Annotation Edit compatible with QuickTime 7.5

Annotation Edit works well with QuickTime 7.5 . But some third party QuickTime components show problems (Perian, FLV, etc). As a result the waveform may be created a bit slower or not at all.

The text overlay sometimes flickers in Annotation Edit?

Yes. Take it as a warning that your chosen font cannot represent all characters. To be safe you may consider to change the font for all exports as well. In most cases switching to Arial will solve unicode font problems.

The table view is missing text entries after updating to 1.3.5.x

There is no data loss. The interface representation is missing because of a preference incompatibility. Some preferences of interface elements are managed by the system. Starting with version 1.3.5.3 inconsistent preferences are automatically repaired. To help yourself immediately, just close Annotation Edit. Rename or put your current preferences aside and start Annotation Edit.

Do I need a license to use the Annotation Edit FCP import plugin?

No. The Final Cut Pro plugin is basically free. But for best workflow Annotation Edit will give you the additional comfort you might miss otherwise.

Final Cut Pro renders just sample text after xml import

To use the Annotation Edit FCP export in Final Cut, you will have to install the FCP plugin from the Annotation Edit distribution to /Library/Application Support /Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins.
If the plugin is not installed, FCP will try it's best but fail, just rendering generic text.

Can I use Final Cut Express HD with Annotation Edit?

Yes. It works just fine. Export to Final Cut Pro. Put our subtitle plugin in /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support.
Start Final Cut Express HD and add the exported file to the project browser. A new sequence with editable subtitles will be created for you.

STL import does not work in DVDStudioPro 3 ?

If your subtitle contains unicode characters , you will have to use the "Export to RTF" option in the DVDStudio export plugin. DVD Studio Pro 4 accepts unicode files directly. In any case unicode characters (like music symbol) must be included in the selected font to display properly.

QuickTime 7.4 / Perian subtitles do not work?

You should update to the Perian 1.1. For QuickTime 7.5 there is no Perian update available yet.
Also QuickTime 7.4 did break "Export as subtitled QuickTime movie" on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, use the newer "Export as QuickTime movie" instead. If you need multi-track subtitles an interim workaround has been prepared.

SCC Positions are different on import and export?

Yes. Due to the different layout models of Annotation Edit and SCC exporting to SCC can be handled without any loss, but import can only be mapped to come close.

Is Annotation Edit really compatible with Leopard?

Yes almost. Leopard will bring features, that are Leopard-only. For now the Leopard version a little behind Tiger: Export to subtitled movie is disabled and partially replaced by export to QuickTime reference movie.

What video formats do you recommend for use with Annotation Edit?

For highest frame accuracy any format is recommended, that sets every frame as a key frame, such as DV, Prores HD, Pixlet, Apple Intermediate, Photo JPEG. Any heavily compressed format with wide key frame settings will be less useful. In most cases scrubbing is limited. This is especially true for H.264, Sorenson and MPEG-2.
Scrubbing forward is ok in most cases, but backward scrubbing may not work as expected. There is a bug in the Apple QuickTime 7.1. H.264 encoder/decoder, that may even crash the application when scrubbing backwards.
This bug is apparent in all QuickTime applications that offer scrubbing with play backward, including Apple QuickTime Player (Jog shuttle).
So if you compress your movie with H.264 we strongly advise you to check the "Key Frames: All" option for smooth and reliable work.
Turning off scrubbing at all for certain formats would be the only fix on our side.
Processing the waveform of avi/divx/xvid files may take significantly longer, as these files require pre-processing by a 3rd party component (e.g. Perian), scrubbing backwards with audio is currently not possible with the Perian ac3 decoder.

Update:
QuickTime 7.2 fixes the H.264 bug mentioned above.

The application update function shows an error?

There was an error on the appcast server. This is fixed.

Important: QuickTime 7.2 iLife compatibilty update

The latest QuickTime iLife compatibilty update did not ask for a restart. Although Apple did forget, it is needed though. Annotation Edit and several other applications may show irregular behaviour if no restart was done.

QuickTime does not open the scc file?

There are two reasons.
1. You did not restart QuickTime Player after installing the ClosedCaptionImporter.component,
2. You have too short captions. Please remember: captions are slow, give them at least 2 seconds playtime. Annotation Edits warns you, if captions are too short, the gray bar beneath the duration display turns blue.

The Apple closed caption component shows wrong umlauts?

Yes. It is just a developer sample. Annotation Edit exports western european umlauts as SCC allows, it will work fine in Compressor or DVD Studio Pro.

Why don´t you support file format XXX

Because we do not support it now. We try any feature we offer to be state of the art or better. Just supporting some file format as well is not on our timetable. If demand is high we will support those formats with high priority. Knock on wood.

How to set up a jog shuttle with Contour Design Shuttle Pro/Express

Important Note On latest Leopard using ContourDesign Shuttle is compromised. The fix is immediately available now.
As importing shuttle settings sometimes seems to be not that easy or you want to set it up for yourself.
Outer Wheel
Shuttle Zone 0 :
Computer response - Type Keystroke : Cmd-K
Shuttle Zone (all other zones) :
Computer Response - Scroll Left or Scroll Right
Scroll Amount - 1 to 9 lines
Inner Wheel
Turn Jog Left :
Computer Response - Type Keystroke : Cmd-J
Turn Jog Right :
Computer Response - Type Keystroke : Cmd-L

QuickTime text or QuickTime preview are not correct.

There are 3 possible reasons:
1 You imported a file that has continuity problems. As QuickTime in most cases has a timebase of 600 and subtitle formats often use the video timebase there is an accuracy problem- A quick fix is to select all entries and press the minimum gap button.
2. You joined tracks. You might continue as in case 1. But you should survey cardinal overlaps before.
3. You entered non latin track or author information. Unicode is supported well for subtitles, but not for QuickTime metadata.

Since QuickTime 7.2 exporting to self-contained movies works different?

Yes. If you do own QuickTime Pro, you can save new movie at any place you like. If you have not bought QuickTime Pro, the easiest way to get the known functionality back, is to exchange QuickTime Player 7.2 with QuickTime Player 7.1.6 or earlier. A tool named "Pacifist" and the still offered QuickTime 7.1.6 download from Apple will help not having to reinstall QuickTime. We are watching this issue, but will wait for the next updates to come, before offering application changes. Switching back to QuickTime Player 7.1.6 is painless.
QuickTime 7.1.6

How to export mp3 from QuickTime movies

Use the lame.component for Quicktime available here: Lame encoder project page.
Older versions of iTunes (5) also can export movies to mp3.

Why do you use a separate file for audio spotting?

Because doing it this way is fast, efficient and allows audio preprocessing without crippling the sound you hear from your current media file. An instant audio spotting, limiting the audio spotting quality only to the measures given by your file is included in the shipping beta. This feature will supersede the Audio Spotting plugin within short. Any file aac/sd2/mov/aiff/wav etc can be taken as source. To assign the Quick Spotting to your project, just drag and drop it in.

Why is it not possible to export the preview movie with QuickTime Player?

The preview movie is actually a smil project. Apple's smil renderer does not work well when when exporting smil projects.
You should export to QuickTime reference movie with Annotation Edit instead. This movie can be rendered to any format supported by QuickTime. We use smil because it is fast, human readable, reusable and w3c standard. A smil project is added to version 1.2.

How can I use Microsoft Word to edit your "RTF with Links" format?

There is a simple workaround. Open the exported rtf in Annotation Transcriber or TextEdit and save the file as HTML. MS Word can read HTML. To continue with active links in Annotation Transcriber please save your MS Word-Document as rtf. Please note: MS Word garbles the links when saving as word or html.

Why do you export text and not pictures?

We believe pictures are the very last resort to represent text. To enable complete control till publishing your video, text should be editable at any state.
For instance the DVD standard does not allow full anti-aliasing. Quality relies more on processing settings done in the DVD authoring environment and the DVD player, than on imported pictures. So why not choose the more elegant way?
Update: Since Blu-Ray allows stylish font setting, All Blu-ray image formats are supported for Blu-Ray BDN.

Why do you don't support styles within subtitles?

Final Cut Pro up to 5.1 does not support styles for single words. Styles have been added to other exchange formats after the file format was finished. So there may be proprietary dialects and that will lead to a more complicated workflow - including garbled text.
We believe data exchange should be as clean, error free and lossless as possible.

What is the difference between Annotation Studio Server and browser-based Annotation Server?

Annotation Studio Server is a high performance workgroup server based on Apple WebObjects. For more information you send a mail to zeitAnker Serverinfo.
Our browser-based Annotation Server is set up on an open source CMS. So you can start at very little costs.
If your video archive needs more perfomance because of tens of thousands of videos and hundreds of concurrent users, we can scale up.

Why is the text missing when importiing XML into Final Cut Pro?

You will have to install our Final Cut Pro plugin before import. The plugin is free, so if you send your project to another machine, be sure to install the plugin there as well.

Software update is sometimes out of sync

As the call for updates is answered by a webserver, typical webpage caching may occur. That should vanish automatically the next day.

Who do you not mention MacCaption's advanced features?

To be honest: I have not seen them working. Partly beacuse of missing hardware, partly because the demo did not work as expected.
If you really need to spend more than 5.000 $, we believe it is a good idea to buy their PC Version CaptionMaker and a PC, or if you are in Europe you might consider FAB Subtitler and a PC.
If you need an affordable Closed Captions Video Encoder, it might be a good idea to combine Annotation Edit with CCaption. This may save you lots of thousands of dollars. Just think of multiple workstations.

Will there be a Windows version?

Of course. But not in any detail right now. At first we support Windows, Linux and Mac OSX on the server side.
Browser-based viewing and annotations are supported as well. In case of Linux choose MPEG-4 as video deployment format. Browser-based annotation may come to Linux in later releases.
For integration with complementary Windows tools, Annotation Studio's own file format as well as several popular exchange formats can be used.
We think about porting Annotation Edit on demand.

Wann kommt das deutsche Handbuch?

Nachdem alle Fenheiten der englischen Fassung abgeschlossen sind. Zur Zeit ist Englisch die Primärsprache, auch weil es in Deutschland ganz gut verstanden wird .... Die Kurzbefehle sind aus ergonomischen Gründen verschieden, daher liegt provisorisch eine ältere Fassung des deutschen Handbuch bei.

Who is this laughing guy in the QuickTime viewer?

We now know. The actor is Richard Massingham. More information here on screenonline . The complete video for download can be found on archive.org: Pedestrian Crossing. Trust me, the movie is very amusing.